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 Washington State Statistical Analysis Center (WA SAC) is located in the Health and Human Services Section of the Washington State Office of Financial Managements (OFM) Forecasting and Research Division. This designation was made by Gov. Booth Gardner in May 1989 through Executive Order 89-03. OFM, as the states central management agency and as the governors budget and policy office, is uniquely positioned to facilitate, implement and coordinate an integrated approach to research and forecasting for justice-related programs.
The WA SAC will conduct two projects for the 2016 SJS programs. Under the first project, the SAC will build on work initiated in 2013. These projects saw the WA SAC expand and strengthen the cross-sector research in Washington State by entering into an affiliation agreement with the Washington State Education Research and Data Center (ERDC). This partnership continues to build upon the centers current collaborative research activities under the 2014 SJS award and will leverage their existing infrastructures to develop the capacity for conducting multi-sector research. The ERDC has built a P20W data warehouse with longitudinally-linked individual data from multiple sectors including early learning, K-12 education, K-12 discipline, higher education, and workforce data. With the assistance of the SAC, several criminal justice data sources will be added to the data warehouse. A key component of this special emphasis project is using administrative or operational criminal justice data for research.
As the continuation project of the prior years work, in 2016, the WA SAC will develop a more integrated and robust process of identity resolution across the justice sources, with linkages to the states P20W education and workforce longitudinal research database. In addition to the identity resolution and linking capabilities, the SAC will develop a data model to support the various sources of justice data being managed separately.
In the second project, the WA SAC will continue to determine the effectiveness of their states system for background checks. This project will expand on efforts from 2015 through the WA SAC conducting targeted analyses of arrests, prosecutions, and convictions for firearms-related offenses using the states criminal history records. During the assessment of the criminal history record data, the extent to which arrest information is followed by prosecutor or court disposition information will also be assessed. (CA/NCF)
Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law.
