Wyoming Marijuana Impact Review Panel and Wyoming Crime Victimization Survey

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 Wyoming Statistical Analysis Center (WYSAC) is located within the College of Arts and Science at the University of Wyoming. The WYSAC will be conducting two project under the core capacity building and special emphasis SJS program areas: 1) forming the Wyoming Marijuana Impact Review Panel, and 2) conducting a crime victimization survey (CVS).

Under the 2015 SJS Core Capacity area (other capacity building project), the WYSAC will be forming the Wyoming Marijuana Impact Review Panel (Panel) to study both the legal and criminal impacts related to the decriminalization of possession of small quantities of marijuana, legalization of medical marijuana and the legalization of marijuana for recreational use. Specifically, the Panel will conduct an analysis of DUI arrests from 2012-2014 that involve drugs (marijuana), conduct literature reviews on outcomes from other states that decriminalize marijuana, produce a summary of primary issues from other states that legalize marijuana use, provide an analysis of several attitudinal questions and a final report detailing the findings of the panel. The Panel will also expand WYSAC’s access to new data sources critical to the state and national effort to objectively analyze and understand both the upsides and downsides of rapidly changing marijuana laws across the country, including border states such as Colorado. The purpose of this project is to gather information that will help Wyoming and other states prepare for the rapidly changing environment with regard to attitudes towards marijuana use since 2010.

Under the SJS Special Emphasis area, the WYSAC will be conducting a crime victimization survey. Wyoming conducted prior CVSs in 2003 and 2011. The questionnaire developed for the 2011 CVS drew heavily from the BJS National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) instrument to enable comparisons of the Wyoming data to the national data. After the SJS 2015 solicitation was announced, the WYSAC offered to assist other SACs with data collection since many SACs may have had an interest, but not adequate data collection capabilities to conduct a statewide and/or targeted sample CVS. In line with the solicitation and encouraging multi-SAC cooperation, the WYSAC discussed methodology and provided cost estimates to the Minnesota and Missouri SACs.

The proposed WYSAC CVS is designed to provide a detailed representation of crime incidents, victims, and trends throughout the state of Wyoming. The survey focuses on three areas: Nature and Frequency of Crime, Attitudes toward Policing and Government, and information about Victims, Offenders, and Crimes.

CA/NCF