Judicial Statistics

the branch of statistics that gathers and analyzes data on crimes and other violations of the law, as reported and considered by the appropriate organs of the state; the branch of statistics concerned with keeping account of anticrime measures. In the USSR, legal statistics comprise statistics on criminal justice, civil cases, administrative offenses, disciplinary offenses, and procuratorial supervision.

In prerevolutionary Russia, the idea of making judicial statistics an independent branch of statistics was given initial expression by A. N. Radishchev. In practice, however, judicial statistics were kept only after the Judicial Reform of 1864. Russian judicial statistics and prominent Russian judicial statisticians, such as E. N. Tarnovskii and N. Nekliudov, made many contributions to the theory and practice of keeping account of crime.

The indexes used in judicial statistics mirror the structure and dynamics of violations of the law, the work of the agencies responsible for the successive stages in a criminal and civil proceeding, and administrative anticrime measures. There are various statistics concerning criminal law. Statistics on preliminary investigations record the work of the state organs that investigate crimes. Statistics on criminal procedure reflect the work of courts of the first and second instance and supervisory courts in the examination of criminal cases. Statistics on the execution of judgments record the work of the corrective-labor institutions. Other criminal statistics concern crime prevention and detection on the part of organs of internal affairs, the current status of crime and trends in crime, and the personality of the criminal.

Statistics on civil matters are divided into statistics on civil procedure and statistics on the execution of court judgments.

Judicial statistics are essential to planning activities concerned with the analysis and prevention of violations of socialist legality; without them, socialist legality cannot be made more effective.

Today, all states keep judicial (criminal) statistics. In the major imperialist countries, even official judicial statistics cannot conceal the fact that crime is constantly on the rise, a social phenomenon engendered by the exploitative nature of capitalist society.