Maryland State Justice Statistics Program 2021

The Maryland SAC (MSAC) is applying for two projects. One under the theme “collecting and analyzing data on criminal justice system processes” and one under “increasing access to statistical data” under the Core Capacity-Building Project program area. Assessing court level data to do any type of aggregate analysis has always been challenging in the State of Maryland. Recently, the Maryland Volunteer Lawyer Service created the Client Legal Utility Engine (CLUE). This tool is a datascraper that pulls data directly from Maryland’s Judiciary Case Search, which is the state’s public facing court records search. The database includes Maryland district court and circuit records dating back to 1990. The MSAC is applying for a continuation of 8 different research projects using analysis of this data including tracking various arrest trends, pretrial hearing results, prosecution rates, sentencing length trends, court ordered restitution, local recidivism rates, and pretrial failure rates. The MSAC also proposes to further analyze this court data over the COVID-19 timeframe to determine what impact if any COVID-19 has had on court trends in the state. The second project in this application includes creating a data inventory for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which are very common in Maryland and can lead to negative outcomes. This project involves receiving data from a variety of local, state, federal, and non-profit agencies. The next step would be to clean and collate all data and create an interactive dashboard that can be used to better evaluate the youth outcomes of the SAA grants that address ACEs as well as use the data to allocate resources in areas of need.