Administrative Data that Describe Experiences with the Federal Criminal Justice System

• In Event: Linking Administrative Data from the BJS’ Federal Justice Statistics Program

Abstract

For the past 20 years, the Federal Justice Statistics (FJS) program has collected data from federal justice agencies that deal with investigation, prosecution, adjudication and corrections. Although the FJS data describe cases as they are processed by each agency, the data do not identify any specific offender’s experiences with the federal criminal justice system. Consequently, questions such as time between arrest and trial or recidivism within the Federal justice system are difficult to answer. Working with the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Abt Associates has redesigned the FJS program to build the data around offenders’ experiences. In the redesigned system, a data record captures an offender’s transition from investigation to completion of his or her sentence. This redesign transforms the FJS from an agency-based system to an offender-based system while maintaining the ability to continue to produce agency-based data. This presentation will describe the new FJS program and explain how FJS data can be used to answer questions about federal justice data administration.

Authors

• Ryan Kling, Abt Associates, Inc.

• Christina Dyous, Abt Associates, Inc.

• Jeremy Luallen, Abt Associates, Inc.

• Bill Rhodes, Abt Associates, Inc.