Vermont Statistical Analysis Center

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 Vermont Statistical Analysis Center (SAC), located in the Division of Justice and Community Services, will use SJS funds to complete a comprehensive analysis to determine how drug cases are handled by police, prosecutors, the judiciary, and corrections. Specifically, the SAC will: 1) identify the 5,391 drug arrests in Vermont from 2009-2012 and follow those arrests through prosecution, adjudication, and correction; 2) measure the post-disposition recidivism for the 832 Vermont defendants convicted of drug crimes in 2009; 3) assist Vermont criminal justice agencies to develop community outcome indicators by which to measure the effect of law enforcement projects designed to reduce drug crime; and 4) create an online, interactive, graphic-intense, and portable summary of the project's findings. Additionally, the SAC will use funds to develop a "proof of concept" pilot exchange of sensitive data with a non-criminal justice agency that employs an encryption software algorithm and has a third party link sets of records based on the encrypted match keys and de-identifies all records by removing personally identifying information. The successful implementation of this exchange will enable the SAC to access data for research purposes that are currently not available due to privacy restrictions.

CA/NCF