1.1 DEFINITION AND SCOPE
The National Criminal Justice Statistical Framework (NCJSF) provides a structure for organising, collecting and reporting data about crime and the criminal justice system (CJS). The Framework builds connections across the main sectors of the CJS by modelling it in a way that transcends the data requirements and usages of individual sectors. The Framework therefore models how criminal justice data should be structured rather than how these data currently are structured within the various administrative data systems used by agencies involved in criminal justice.
The scope of this version of the Framework has been restricted to data relating to the criminal justice system. It does not include the civil justice system, though at a general level, the Framework does encompass the processes of the civil justice system, in that civil matters also require a process of adjudication and some outcome of that adjudication. This version includes key data variables currently collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Version 1.0 of the Framework also excludes data such as policing activity not concerned with the prevention, detection, investigation or control of crime (for example, traffic management, crowd control or rescue activities); revenue or expenditure associated with the provision of criminal justice services; and specific crime prevention strategies, programs and activities.
The primary function of the NCJSF is to facilitate compatibility and integration of aggregated data on populations (for example, data about a group of persons or cases), not individual unit record data (that is, information about a particular person or case). Thus the use of common unique identifiers to track individuals throughout the criminal justice system is neither a feature nor a prerequisite for implementing the statistical framework.
1.2 STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES
The primary purpose of the NCJSF is to identify the key counting units and data variables in the criminal justice system that would allow stakeholders to characterise the main aspects of that system. The strategic objectives that follow from this purpose include:
Objective 1: Integrating criminal justice data between the different, interconnecting sectors of the criminal justice system.
Objective 2: Integrating criminal justice data across the States and Territories of Australia and other geographical regions.
Objective 3: Facilitating discussions between the ABS and its clients on the relative priorities for future development of criminal justice data collections.
Objective 4: Promoting the adoption of standardised methods of collecting, compiling and disseminating statistics.
1.3 DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Throughout the development process of Version 1.0, it has been recognised that the Framework must meet the requirements of a range of stakeholders. Through consultations with a wide group of potential users and advisers in the criminal justice field, the ABS has tried to identify the full spectrum of needs for national data and information relating to crime and the criminal justice system. The agencies consulted are listed in Appendix 1.
No statistical framework is perfect, and the NCJSF will be no different. While the structure and contents of the NCJSF will successfully serve some purposes, there will be others for which it is overly simple or even inadequate. This is an acknowledged and accepted part of any statistical framework, as there will always be an element of compromise when bringing order to a complex reality. As with other frameworks, the NCJSF needs to be seen as a dynamic and evolving document that will be developed over time. Version 1.0 of the Framework represents the first phase of a staged approach to the development of a comprehensive statistical framework for criminal justice data.
1.4 OVERVIEW OF THE REPORT
The Framework report is divided into a number of chapters. Chapter 2 describes the needs for and benefits of a Framework and examines some of the key questions in criminal justice that it may help address. Chapter 3 presents the conceptual background to the Framework which explains the Framework's conceptual underpinnings; describes the social and economic context of the criminal justice system; and provides a discussion of the broadest concepts upon which the Framework is based. Chapter 4 describes the CJS processes in more detail and presents a number of diagrams to illustrate pictorially the major processes of the system and the relationships among the key counting units. Discussion of the key counting units and data variables in the Framework are also presented. Specific definitions of the data variables are presented at the end of the Glossary.
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