State Court Processing Project, 2009

The State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) project is a recurring data collection involving felony cases in 40 large urban counties chosen to be representative of the 75 largest counties in the U.S. Approximately 15,000 felony cases are tracked for up to 1 year with data collected on the pretrial, adjudication and sentencing phases of the criminal court process. The data collection provides a unique overview of how felony defendants are processed in state courts. Pretrial data collected include the detention-release outcome, and the conditions of release such as bail amount and type of release bond. Defendants' conduct while in a release status is tracked in terms of their court appearance record, violations of release conditions, and re-arrests. Type of adjudication and adjudication outcome are also recorded. For those defendants convicted, sentencing data are collected. In addition, data on the defendants' demographic characteristics, criminal justice status at the time of arrest, and prior arrests and convictions are collected. The resulting data file allows for a complete overview of the felony criminal justice system as published in the BJS report series "Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties." In fiscal year 2008, BJS awarded funds to redesign and re-conceptualize the SCPS project. This iteration of SCPS will provide an opportunity to begin initiating certain aspects of the SCPS redesign as well as administering a data collection of felony cases processed in the nation's 75 most populous counties.

CA/NCF