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For years, The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has used information stored in the nation’s automated criminal history records to assess the officially-recognized, law-violating behavior of various samples of individuals. To do recidivism studies, BJS has provided state criminal history repositories with identifying information on study subjects and has requested each participating state repository to extract selected information on each subject’s criminal justice activities, thus creating a reporting burden for participating repositories. In addition, the structure and content of the data extracted from these repositories varies from state to state requiring customized software to transform each state’s data into a commonly-formatted, researchable database. In light of these challenges, only two national recidivism studies of released prisoners have been performed by BJS to date; the first in 1983 and the latest in 1994.
The current program, conducted by NORC, will enhance the Department of Justice’s research capabilities and allow BJS to conduct recidivism and criminal career research far more cost efficiently and, as a result, more frequently. To accomplish this, NORC will take the state electronic criminal history records -or “RAP” sheets (Record of Arrest and Prosecution) - for each of the 70,0000 sampled state prisoners released in 2005 and create an open source conversion software package that takes these files and converts them into nationally standardized codes that will be used to examine the extent to which former prisoners return to criminal activity. The open source conversion software package can then be used for additional sample cohorts to produce research files that generations of research analysts will be able to use to study recidivism; including activity that occurs across state lines.
Although state repositories often have policies regarding the processing of criminal history records, many states do not conform to these requirements and/or the content within individual data elements varies. In addition, there are hundreds of individual police jurisdictions, courts, and corrections departments each reporting arrests, criminal case dispositions, and sentences in their own way to the state. As a result, NORC will be required to meticulously review all of the records received from the FBI's Triple I system (and parsed by a third party) and create and program multiple crosswalks and coding rules that standardize each record for purposes of comparison across states.
After the initial crosswalks and coding rules for the current sample cohort are established, dynamic logic rules will be programmed to handle future sample cohorts including arrest records and codes that may not have been present in the original sample. This will be the first and only conversion software package of its kind.