Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2019, $198,381)
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 Wisconsin SAC (WISAC), as part of the Bureau of Justice Information and Analysis (BJIA), is located within the Division of Law Enforcement Services (DLES) at the Department of Justice (WDOJ). The SAC will be using SJS funds to conduct a Special Emphasis project (CCH Repository Research and Evaluation).
The WISAC will use SJS funds to continue to build on the projects from the 2015-16 SJS awards, which supported initial work using the states CCH repository for research and evaluation purposes. The project will start to explore the use of Wisconsins CCH to understand felony and misdemeanor arrests based on the data reported to the repository by law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and then connected to prosecutor, court disposition and related data based on applicable statutes. The overall focus of the project will be to analyze trends in the criminal history based on demographics of the arrestees, the geographic distribution of arrests, and the pattern of arrests based on the types of charges. Based on the initial analysis findings during the project, the research may also expand into the analysis of the arrests through the next steps in the criminal justice process which may include the charging decision and court disposition. Additional analyses may be conducted to examine the outcome of the arrests based on the demographic, geographic, and charge type distribution. Steps to complete the project include: analyzing arrests; demographic analysis; offense analysis, data quality analysis; dashboard development; completing the final report and dashboards.
(CA/NCF)