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 Nebraska Statistical Analysis Center is located within the Nebraska Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (Commission). Since 2002, it has been a part of the Information Services Division of the Crime Commission. This Division is composed of the Uniform Crime Reporting section as well as charged with research and statistical duties such as data integration and agency information technology. Additionally, the Crime Commission is the responsible state agency for providing statistical support for community correction planning. The SAC is well-positioned to effect change on a number of activities that ultimately impact data collection and use. Production of statistical reports as part of regular or ad hoc need is an ongoing responsibility of the SAC. These are derived from statistical databases that the SAC has developed, gets access to or maintains.
Under the 2018 SJS program, the Commission will conduct two projects: a Core Capacity and Special Emphasis project.
Under the Core Capacity project, the Commission will establish standard capabilities for collecting, analyzing and disseminating jail admissions statistics to the public. As the Crime Commission has developed both operational and statistical partnerships, they have gotten more access to core data and plan to expand the efforts of their state capacity in conjunction with the states justice reinvestment initiatives.
In this project, the Commission will use the data distributed to them from the Victim Information and Notification Everyday (VINE) program to process and extract information for statistical purposes. Once analyzed, the data will then be used to develop information to be disseminated via the Commission website. Once complete, the public will be able to review, in the aggregate, where offenders are being booked from or to.
Under the Special Emphasis Project, the Commission will integrate Crime Commission and other agency data through the linking of data sources across agencies and develop a Justice Data Transformation System (JDTS). The Commission believes that effective record linkage is the important element that makes an applied data integration project work. As such, the project will entail the SAC merging, matching, and de-duplication through data cleaning and standardization to achieve the goals. Due to the complexity of data matching, the challenge of finding records from two different sources that match, and by implementing a data transformation system, the data warehouse will perform deterministic matching, followed by a probabilistic matching algorithm and ultimately, a clerical review and evaluation of records that fall outside of the realm of standard linkage techniques.
This process will entail the Commission programming the JDTS to map, establish, and maintain a population table -- in which there is only one unique observation for each person instead of just linking one database to the other. Specifically, once a population table is established, a database, in collection or singular, can be matched and scheduled for updating matching to the population table. The development of the data exchange system will afford the SAC an opportunity to expand its research capabilities.
(CA/NCF)
