Collins Memorial Library: Crime, Law, and Justice Studies: Primary Sources & Statistics

Primary Sources in Crime, Law, and Justice Studies

What you use as primary source materials in Crime, Law, and Justice Studies will depend on the course, the research assignment, and your framework and aims. Below you will find links to selected print and digital collections and data sets. You may want to see the separate page for newspaper sources.

What's a Primary Source?

Primary sources are original, uninterpreted information. Scholars analyze primary sources in order to answer research questions. Examples of primary sources vary by discipline.

Examples in the humanities:

a novel
a painting
a theatre performance

Examples in the social sciences:

a political, social, or economic theory
a dataset
the results of an experiment published in a peer-reviewed journal

Example in the sciences:

the results of an experiment published in a peer-reviewed journal

Print Collections @ Collins Library

Tenacious zine box set : art & writings by women in prison, 2002 to 2020 by Victoria Law, editor
Call Number: Ask for at Archives & Special Collections (second floor). Library use only.
A collection in zine format of articles, essays, poetry and art by formerly and currently incarcerated women across the United States.
Brothers in Pen: stories from the annual public reading San Quentin State Prison, July 13, 2013. by Zoe Mullery, editor
Call Number: Print Books PN6069.P7 B771 2013
ISBN: 9781312297500
Publication Date: 2014
This book is a collection of the work read aloud by the Wednesday Night Creative Writing Class, or "Brothers in Pen," at San Quentin State Prison on July 13, 2013.

Data & Statistics

Social Explorer
A research tool designed to provide access to historical census data and demographic information. It creates maps and reports to help users visually analyze and understand demography and social change throughout history.

Social Explorer includes the entire US Census (1790 to 2010) and the American Community Survey (2005 to 2015).

Specialized U.S. data resources include the FBI Uniform Crime Report (2010 to 2015), American election results (1912 to 2016), Religious Congregations and Membership Study (1980 and 2010), Vulcan Project carbon emissions data (2002), US Business Patterns (2014), and County Health Rankings and Roadmaps Program data (2010 to 2016).

International data resources include the United Kingdom Census (2011), Canadian Census (2011), Eurostat (1990, 2000, 2010 to 2013), World Development Indicators (2013), and Irish religion and population data (1911 and 2001).

Digital Collections

American Prison Newspapers, 1800-2020: Voices from the Inside
Brings together hundreds of newspapers published within prisons by incarcerated people over the past 200 years. When complete, the collection will contain newspapers from prisons in every state, representing penal institutions of all kinds, including women-only institutions.

Washington Prison History Project
"The Washington Prison History Project aims to provide researchers, policy-makers, students, and others with primary sources into the history and ongoing reality of mass incarceration in Washington state and the broader Northwest."
Queer & Trans Prison Voices
The project serves as a digital archive for queer and trans incarcerated voices and consists of two integrative tracks:
The Sonic Archive of Prison Writings, which holds a collection of recorded readings by queer & transgender incarcerated people; and the Podcast Series “Queer & Trans Voices,” which features interviews with activist scholars, abolitionist organizations and sound artists working towards prison abolition.
Prison Pandemic (UCI)
"By providing a digital archive of stories, UCI PrisonPandemic™ is bringing greater transparency to the COVID-19 crisis in prisons and jails. Made up of faculty and students at the University of California, Irvine, it is an ongoing initiative to collect stories from people incarcerated in California carceral facilities, their family members and loved ones, and the staff who work in these facilities."
American Prison Writing Archive at Hamilton College
"The mission of the APWA is to replace speculation on and misrepresentation of prisons, imprisoned people, and prison workers with first-person witness by those who live and work on the receiving end of American criminal justice. No single essay can tell us all that we need to know. But a mass-scale, national archive can begin to strip away widely circulated myths and replace them with some sense of the true human costs of the current legal order. By soliciting, preserving, digitizing and disseminating the work of imprisoned people, prison workers and volunteers, we hope to ground national debate on mass incarceration in the lived experience of those who know prisons best."