The local jail system in the United States processed about 10 million admissions and saw an average daily population of just under 750,000 individuals in 2019 (Zeng & Minton, 2021). Research and reporting on the local jail system is inhibited by substantial barriers related to dispersed record management spread across more than 3,200 facilities. The majority of current data collection efforts focus on support of aggregate statistical reporting which severely narrows the utility of the data for other statistical purposes.Collecting
person-level administrative records from the local jail system will advance both the opportunities for statistical reporting and research.
