Characterizing Offender Experiences in the Federal Justice System: An Exploration of Typologies Using the FJSP

• In Event: Application of the Current Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP) to Guide Current Criminal Justice Policy

Abstract

The Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP) is an on-going data collection program sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) that compiles data on nearly all phases of the criminal justice process: investigation, prosecution, pretrial supervision and detention, adjudication, sentencing, prison stay, and post-release supervision. Since 2013, BJS has led an effort to assemble these data as a longitudinal series of records that describe individual offender experiences as they flow through the federal system, with the explicit goal of strengthening the analytic capability of the FJS data to inform important policy questions. This paper summarizes some results from those efforts. Specifically, this paper explores patterns of movement as described in the data to characterize offender experiences and organize these experiences under a set of typologies. The emphasis of this paper is on working with the actual data rather than establishing a conceptual framework. This paper also takes the step of establishing programming steps that analysts may use to construct stylized analytic files that employ this typological structure.

Authors

• Jeremy Luallen, Abt Associates Inc.

• Dan Litwok, Abt Associates Inc.