Funded Research by Theme

The Local Jail Reporting Pilot aims to improve the administration of the justice system and enable the creation of knowledge that could be used to inform policy discussions about justice system reform (Wormeli, 2018). Recent advancements by criminal justice data infrastructure projects, such as the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), though now provide the tools to support the process of collecting, harmonizing, and linking data made available by the disparately organized jail system in the United States.

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.