Oregon's State Justice Statistics Program for FY 2017

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) is housed Oregon Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) which became the State Administering Agency in 2009. The SAC is requesting funds to support one core capacity project (Measuring Recidivism) and one special emphasis project (Analysis of Felony Processing Trends).

For first project, the SAC will analyze traditional ways of measuring recidivism trends in the state, which includes the number of recidivating events within a 3-year period as well as a break down by crime type. The analysis will provide more detail around the frequency of recidivating events in addition to the diversity of crimes committed. In 2015, Oregon created a new definition of recidivism which is an arrest, conviction, or incarceration for a new crime within 3 years of release from incarceration or imposition of probation. The current definition of recidivism has limitations and the SAC believes further analysis is needed such as crime type specialization. The project will expand the current recidivism measures to include frequency and crime type specialization of recidivating events. Once the expanded measures have been identified, software queries will be saved so that the measures can be updated and applied to population subsets. The results will be beneficial to key local and statewide stakeholders, district attorneys, county commissioners, community corrections, victim advocates, law enforcement and treatment providers. The SAC will publish the Oregon Recidivism Analysis report which will be available on the CJC website.

The 2-year special emphasis project involves conducting an in-depth analysis of felony case processing trends. The Oregon Judicial Department (OJD) recently transitioned the circuit courts to the new data Odyssey system and now historical and current data is available from all 36 Oregon circuit courts. The project will focus the analysis on the most serious charges, and subsequent most serious conviction for all felony cases. The CJC will merge the data from Odyssey to records from the DOC to provide missing state identification numbers as well as provide missing demographic information. A main element of the analysis will be the racial and ethnic disparity within felony case processing trends which will further inform case processing trends not only for felony drug possession cases, but all felony cases filed in Oregon. The intended audience for the analysis are legislators, the public, and key local and statewide stakeholders. The project will build capacity for the SAC by expanding historical trend analysis to include felony case processing trends. The project deliverable will be a publication on Oregon felony case processing trends that specifically addresses racial and ethnic disparity within the process. The publication and interactive data page will be available on the CJC website. (CA/NCF)

Note: This project contains a research and/or development component as defined in applicable law.