Profiling Florida's Property Offenders: A 20 year perspective

The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.

Under this award, the Florida SAC (FSAC) will analyze the state's criminal history records to produce a 20 year perspective profiling property offenders in the state. This project will demonstrate the utility of criminal history data for statistical purposes by creating a data set of Florida arrest and conviction events from January 1, 1989 through December 31, 2008. Two cohorts will be examined; one of property offenders who have their first arrest in 1989 and a second of property offenders who have their first arrest in 1999. Each cohort will be examined to produce a description of the severity and variability of their criminal careers. Approximately 70,000 property offenders will comprise both cohorts and will be analyzed to determine the path of their criminal careers and identify continuity, or lack thereof, in the types and seriousness of crimes over time. Additionally, the 20 year data set resulting from this project will be used by the FSAC in responding to data requests from state criminal justice agencies and research customers to foster cooperation and data sharing, as well as improve data quality.
CA/NCF