Peering Through the Funnel: The Criminal Justice Processing of Firearm-Related Offenses

• In Event: Factors Influencing Criminal Case Processing and Outcomes

Abstract

Local police, prosecutors, and city officials are often asked questions they find difficult to answer concerning the criminal justice processing of persons arrested for serious crimes. For example, what fraction of persons charged with a violent offense are released on bond prior to trial? What fraction of violent offenders are sentenced to probation? Of those, what fraction commits a new violent crime while supervised in the community? The answers are often in the form of anecdotes, which satisfies no one. Such questions cannot be addressed adequately because local criminal justice systems typically lack accessible, integrated databases that provide a view of aggregate case processing from arrest through final disposition. Criminal justice officials and academic researchers in St. Louis have designed such a system and are pretesting it with case-flow data on 227 individuals arrested for a firearm-related offense in 2011. This paper reports the results of the pretest and analyzes case outcomes by the criminal history and age of the arrestees. The prospects and challenges of replicating similar integrated criminal justice databases in other jurisdictions are discussed.

Authors

• Joshua Williams, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Richard Rosenfeld, University of Missouri - St. Louis