BJS: Bureau of Justice Statistics
- Home
- Topics
- Publications & Products
- Data Collections
- Funding
- Data Analysis Tools
- About Us
Data Collection: Inventory of State and Federal Corrections Information Systems
Status: InactiveFrequency: 1998
Latest data available: 1998
This survey summarizes the data elements maintained by state and federal corrections information systems that track adult, sentenced offenders, and assesses the severity of obstacles in reporting statistical information. Two instruments, an Inventory Questionnaire and an Obstacles Survey, were mailed to Departments of Correction in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The Inventory Questionnaire asked 207 questions about data elements describing offenders, 15 questions about elements describing facility management, and 20 questions about the capabilities of the information system to process data electronically. For some elements, questions were asked to determine if more detailed information (subvalues) about the element existed. The Obstacles Survey asked departments to rate the severity of problems they may encounter when processing requests for statistical information. The items were grouped into five categories: legislative and institutional factors, hardware factors, software factors, staffing factors, and data factors. This was a one time collection conducted in 1998.
| On This Page |  |
| Questionnaires |  |
| Inventory of State and Federal Corrections Information Systems | ||
| 1999 PDF (130K) | ||
| Methodology | |
Telephone interviews were conducted with respondents within the departments of corrections in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. These telephone interviews provided vital background information for the design of the Inventory questionnaires, and also supplemented data on the capabilities of corrections information systems. In 1998 two surveys, the Inventory of Data Elements in State and Federal Corrections Information Systems (Inventory survey) and the Survey of Retrieval and Query Capacities of Corrections Information Systems (Obstacles survey), were mailed to information officers in 50 state departments of corrections, the District of Columbia, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Urban Institute staff collected, verified, and coded responses. Data entry and analysis, as well as the preparation of the final report was performed by Urban Institute staff. All 52 departments responded to the Inventory survey and 51 responded to the Obstacles survey.
| Changes Over Time | |
One time collection
| Publications & Products | |
- Publications
Data Tables
Press Releases
| Related Topics | |