The purpose of this study, funded by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), is to explore the incidence and prevalence of prison assaults, particularly sexual assaults, among former prisoners.

In 2006, NORC developed and pretested a self-administered survey instrument to measure sexual assault in prison as reported by paroled offenders.  Twenty parole offices, ten in each of two states, were sampled and seventy-five offenders on active parole supervision at each office were randomly selected and were interviewed in order to provide estimates for the pretest states.  During the field stage of the pretest, the sampling and implementation protocols were tested, as well as the data collection instrument, to assess their adequacy and efficiency for national implementation.  The pretest interviews used both Computer Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI) and Touchscreen Audio CASI (TACASI).

NORC also developed a plan for nationwide implementation to provide national estimates.