Purpose

Sec. 4. The division shall be organized and administered to fulfill the following purposes: (1) To inform the public and responsible governmental officials as to the nature of the crime problem, its magnitude, and its trend over time. (2) To measure the effects of prevention and deterrence programs, ranging from community action to police patrol. (3) To find out who commits crimes by age, sex, family status, income, ethnic and residential background, and other social attributes, to find the proper focus of crime prevention programs. (4) To measure the workload and effectiveness of all agencies of the criminal justice system, both individually and as an integrated system. (5) To analyze the factors contributing to success and failure of probation, parole, and other correctional alternatives for various kinds of offenders. (6) To provide criminal justice agencies with comparative norms of performance. (7) To furnish baseline data for research. (8) To compute the costs of crime in terms of economic injury inflicted upon communities and individuals, as well as to assess the direct public expenditures by criminal justice agencies. (9) To project expected crime rates and their consequences into the future for more enlightened government planning.