Examining State Criminal Justice Expenditure

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.

The Oregon Statistical Analysis Center (SAC), located in the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, will use SJS funds to complete the following activities: 1) support the SAC Director's continued efforts to advance the state's use of the cost-benefit model developed with SJS funds to inform the state legislature about the impact of sentencing changes and investments in evidence-based programs; 2) contribute to a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of drug courts by analyzing court and arrest records, risk assessment scores, sanction histories of study participants, and criminal history records to measure outcomes and determine a measure of recidivism that considers all charges for new crimes, felony charges, misdemeanor charges, in addition to drug, property, person, and other charges; 3) continue efforts to integrate data across the criminal justice system to increase the accessibility of data and to better evaluate outcomes of various programs and sentencing practices; and 4) continue efforts to update and enhance the SAC's website with monthly drug arrest trends by drug type and by county in addition to adding crime data on the new interactive portion of the website.

CA/NCF