ABSTRACT
The forty-nine years of potential life lost by case number 140 is the most disastrous manifestation of a much greater toll of injury, most of which is nonfatal. The statistical information compiled by criminal justice and public health authorities generate a profile of population characteristics that earmark this case rather precisely. The Department of Justice is responsible for the National Crime Survey, a survey of a national probability sample of households designed to estimate rates of crime victimization. The public health lesson worth repeating is that people have often devised methods of controlling a disease with poor, and sometimes even misleading, ideas about its true causation. The story is of a black minister arrested for resisting a restraining order that prohibited the picketing of a construction site in the black community of Roxbury. Criminology is chiefly concerned with the problems of predicting dangerousness and recidivism in convicted individuals.
