Candace Johnson is a Principal Research Scientist in the Substance Abuse, Mental Health and Criminal Justice Studies (SAMHCJ) department at NORC. She oversees projects involving collection and analysis of criminal justice data and statistics.
Johnson is currently involved in research for the Bureau of Justice Statistics on sexual victimization of former prisoners, and conversion and standardization of RAP sheet data for the development of recidivism study files. Additionally, she is involved in research on the post-release success of prior prisoners for an experimental evaluation of prisoner re-entry programs funded by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Prior to her NORC tenure, Johnson served as a senior research associate and co-president of Justice Studies, Inc. (JSI). In addition to managing the business operations at JSI, she served as co-principal investigator of a study of federal involvement on homicide cases for the National Institute of Justice. Prior to her work at JSI, she served as the director of monitoring for the U.S. Sentencing Commission; in this role, she developed the system for collecting federal sentencing data, managed the collection of data, and was responsible for the preparation of reports to the Commission about federal offenders and sentencing practices under federal sentencing guidelines.