Nebraska SAC - JUSTICE Sentencing Dashboard

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 (SAC) 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 corrections 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 reports are derived from statistical databases that the SAC has developed, gets access to, or maintains.

Under this award, the SAC plans to address two of the core capacity areas: increasing access to statistical data and measuring criminal justice system performance. Specifically, the SAC will use funds to examine efforts to measure justice reinvestment. The SAC will organize and conduct data-related cross agency meetings to identify key metrics and establish expectations for using a data extract from JUSTICE, the NE State Court Administrators court case system. The SAC intends to use data from JUSTICE to create a longitudinal database of offenders to develop more reliable measures of criminal justice system performance and impacts on recidivism rates and determinations of offender risk. The objective of the project is to provide law enforcement agencies as well as decision makers and the general public with useful data that can also be adapted based on the need. Tableau software will be used to disseminate quarterly dashboards summarizing the data analyzed from the JUSTICE system. (CA/NCF)

Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law.