FY 2015 Nebraska State Justice Statistics Program

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 Nebraska Statistical Analysis Center (NSAC) is located within the Nebraska Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (Crime Commission). Since 2002, it has been a part of the Information Services Division of the Crime Commission. This Division is composed of the Uniform Crime Reporting section as well as charged with research and statistical duties such as data integration and agency information technology. Additionally, the Crime Commission is the responsible state agency for providing statistical support for community correction planning. The SAC is well-positioned to effect change on a number of activities that ultimately impact data collection and use. Production of statistical reports as part of regular or ad hoc need is an ongoing responsibility of the SAC. These are derived from statistical databases that the SAC has developed, gets access to or maintains.

Under this award, the Crime Commission proposes to better understand juvenile, and adult court activity by building on operational level data from JUSTICE, the automated court case management system. The jail hold dataset provides general statistics on jail usage as well as critical information used by Jail Standards staff to facilitate evaluating facilities, staffing and other aspects of jail management. A juvenile court dataset provides snapshots of juvenile court activity. The juvenile court dataset was based on a form that provided early data used by the National Center for Juvenile Justice and implemented in Nebraska decades ago. Given the capabilities of JUSTICE the Commission can move to having data not only on juvenile cases but all court activity. This project ultimately seeks to lay the groundwork for linking juvenile and adult court activity with systems such as JUSTICE to ultimately use the dataset as the basis for future research.

This project is intended to expand capacity through: 1) establishing standard analysis protocols and reports for JUSTICE data; 2) examining the use of JUSTICE case level data as a replacement for the antiquated juvenile court collection format currently in place; 3) implementing linkages across jail and JUSTICE court records; 4) working with Corrections to use their records to link across systems; and 5) examining linkages between arrest and JUSTICE court records based on NIBRS arrest reports.

CA/NCF