FY 2022 Mississippi SJS Program

The Mississippi SAC will use FY22 SJS funds towards a “2022-2023 Mississippi Strategic Justice Plan Update”, a compilation of criminal justice data which will assess a range of statewide criminal justice data points which will serve as the basis for the 2022-23 Mississippi Strategic Justice Plan. The project will collect, assess, analyze, and publish data and findings pertinent to the pace and trajectory of Mississippi’s criminal justice infrastructure and data collection mechanisms, which has been the focus of the MS-SAC activity since 2017. In this project, MS-SAC personnel will collect data from state agencies with regard to a number of critical crime prevention mechanisms and strategies to assess the efficacy of programs designed to combat crime and enhance community relations over time, using 2002 and 2007 as benchmark years with which a comparison can be made. Data collected includes crime rates for the state’s population broken down by jurisdiction, violent crime rate trends in 10 year increments, comparison data with other regional peer states, critical drug threats in the past decade, a county-breakdown of violent crime rates and drug abuse violation arrest rates, and dozens of other data points. The state SAC needs to collect this data consistently to provide this information to a criminal justice audience for multiple reasons, but primarily for this project to create benchmarks for programming and targeted crime abatement efforts. In addition, the study can be used by state agencies in funding efforts and public relations spaces in order to garner public support for anti-crime efforts.