The BJS released the following reports in June 2006:

• Characteristics of Drivers Stopped by Police, 2002
• Citizen Complaints about Police Use of Force

A new feature on the Population Reference Bureau Web site asks, “Are U.S. Girls Becoming More Violent?” While arrest statistics show an increase, the answer is not clear-cut.

It’s too soon to know if it’s a trend to worry about, but while murder rates in larger cities have stayed about the same, rates in smaller cities have increased, according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor (June 14, 2006).

From the Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Report. This report offers empirically based answers to frequently asked questions about the nature of juvenile crime and victimization, and about the justice system’s response.

U.S. Census Bureau Report: Tabulating Prisoners at Their “Permanent Home of Record” Address (PDF file). An excerpt from the report — “Our study raises concerns that this change would result in decreased accuracy for a possibly large proportion of millions of individuals confined on Census day.”

The prison inmate population is aging rapidly, but prisons have not yet adapted to the physical and mental needs of geriatric prisoners, according to a study conducted by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Read the full press release on Science Blog.

National Criminal Justice Reference Service Article: “Women and Girls in the Criminal Justice System” (February 2006). Although women remain a relatively small number of all prisoners, these facts have concealed a trend in the rising percentage of female offenders, their participation in violent crime, and have inhibited the development of gender-specific programs to address the issue.

National Institute of Justice Report: “Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Rape Victimization: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey,” by Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes. More than 300,000 women and almost 93,000 men are raped annually, according to the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS).

From NBER, a working paper using data from three waves of Add Health, find that being very attractive reduces a young adult’s (ages 18-26) propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it for a number of crimes, ranging from burglary to selling drugs.

BJS presents data collected from a representative sample of felony cases filed in the Nation’s 75 largest counties during May 2002.