Local Jail Reporting Program

BJS is investigating whether Appriss, Inc., the nation’s largest aggregator of administrative jail data, can provide individual-level data on jail inmates that could compliment and/or replace some of the information we collect annually from jail administrators. This award will supplement will an original small collaborative agreement in FY 15 with Appriss by expanding the number of jail jurisdictions covered and limiting the data to a single year, 2014. This will allow BJS to make direct comparisons between the administrative data and the 2014 data collected by BJS through the Annual Survey of Jails (ASJ), from which BJS published national estimates on jail populations. This comparison will improve BJS’s understanding of the data quality, permitting us to determine whether administrative records might be used in the future to augment or replace certain elements on the ASJ as well as inform other existing collections.