Pretrial Jail Population Data Collection, Analysis and Dissemination

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 New Hampshire Statistical Analysis Center (NHSAC) is located within the New Hampshire Department of Justice. The NHSAC will be conducting one core capacity project (Baseline Data Collection Pilot) to increase access to statistical data and one special emphasis project (Jail Population Analysis) to conduct targeted analyses using the state’s criminal history records.

For the Baseline Data Collection Pilot project, NHSAC will use SJS funds to establish baseline data and develop a data dashboard to monitor the progress of the pilot pretrial initiative in Lebanon Circuit Court. The NHSAC will collect case-level data on felony and misdemeanor cases coming into the system from the year prior to the pilot project beginning. The project will work in collaboration with court officials to set up a collection of the data in addition to pretrial assessment and supervision data coming out of the pilot project on an on-going basis to develop a useful data dashboard. Tasks for the project include: conducting a site visit and meet with court officials and IT staff to determine how to collect the data; develop a data request plan; submit the data request to the court; obtain and collect the court data and input the information into statistical software; clean and analyze the court data; and prepare a final report which includes recommendations for the dashboard and presenting the findings to policy-makers and stakeholders.

For the Jail Population Analysis project, NHSAC will use SJS funds to examine the jail utilization of the pretrial population in all ten New Hampshire county jails. For each county, NHSAC will collect and analyze aggregate trend data over the past five years on the number of reported crimes, number of arrests, and number of criminal case filings which will be broken down by charge type. Over the same five year period, NHSAC will also collect and analyze jail use trend data, including number of bookings, average daily populations, and average length of stay. Tasks for the project include: developing a data request plan; submitting the request to each of the ten jails; obtaining and collecting the jail data and inputting the information into statistical software; cleaning and analyzing the jail data; and preparing a final report and present the findings to key stakeholders.

The NHSAC will work with the Pretrial Justice Institute for both projects who will conduct the collecting, analyzing and dissemination of county and court data while also developing and validating pretrial risk assessment.

(CA/NCF)