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AbstractCoordination and oversight of multisite experiments for evaluation of criminal and civil justice projects can be improved through a Program Review Team approach.

The history of criminal statistics bears testimony to a search for a measure of "criminality" present among a population, a search that led increasingly to a concern about the "dark figure" of crime—that is, about occurrences that by some criteria are called crime yet that are not registered in the statistics of whatever agency was the source of the data being used. Contending arguments arose about the dark figure between the "realists" who emphasized the virtues of com pleteness with which data represent the "real crime" that takes place and the "institutionalists" who emphasize that crime can have valid meaning only in terms of organized, legitimate social responses to it. This paper examines these arguments in the context of police and survey statistics as measures of crime in a population. It concludes that in exploring the dark figure of crime, the primary question is not how much of it becomes revealed but rather what will be the selective properties of any particular innovation for its illumination. Any set of crime statistics, including those of survey research, involve some evaluative, institutional processing of people's reports. Concepts, definitions, quantitative models, and theories must be adjusted to the fact that the data are not some objectively observable universe of "criminal acts," but rather those events defined, captured, and processed as such by some institutional mechanism.

The relative absence of formal provision for the resolution of conflict among organizations in the American legal system results in each one controlling others in the system through constraints on the processing of people and information as inputs to their own organization. This paper focuses on the specific case where the courts attempt to control the behavior of the police through the exclusionary rule, particularly as set forth in the Miranda decision. Data on interrogations of suspects in field patrol settings show that arresting officers always had evidence apart from the inter rogation itself as a basis for arrest. It would appear that the introduction of Miranda-type warnings into field settings would have relatively little effect on the liability of suspects to crimi nal charges, particularly in felony cases, assuming current police behavior with respect to arrest.