Criminal History Records-based Arrest Statistics Tool

The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.

The Illinois Statistical Analysis Center (SAC), located in the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, is one of approximately 36 statistical analysis centers housed within the state administering agency (SAA). The SAC is directly involved in providing research and evaluation support to the SAA, including conducting data analysis to identify areas of high need for strategic Requests for Proposal development, identifying evidence based practices for program development, conducting program evaluation studies, and developing on-line criminal justice-related data resources for grantees submitting funding proposals. Under the FY 2014 SJS program, the SAC will use funds to provide access to additional criminal justice statistics derived from criminal history record information (CHRI), namely conviction information, as well as access to statistics derived from case-level prison admissions records produced by the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). This project builds on efforts from previously funded SJS projects to develop user-friendly, web-based data display tools. The final deliverable, the Criminal Justice Statistics Tool, will allow users to obtain and display CHRI-based arrest and conviction statistics on a wide range of crimes and arrestee demographics, along with prison admissions and prisoner demographics for the same (or different) crimes. The tool will also allow for the graphing of trends from all three variables in a single chart, for a unique and effortless way to detect concomitant variation in those trends that could be the result of changes in legislation, agency policies or offending patterns. In addition to the development of the tool, the SAC will also assist the IDOC with compiling and submitting offender-level information to the BJS's National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) for the most current year and the prior ten years. (CA/NCF)