Analysis of Publicly Available Court Data

The Criminal Cases in State Courts (CCSC), formerly the Analysis of Publicly Available Court Data (APACD) seeks to complete a full data collection of case filings in state courts. The focus of the effort is to reproduce, at a minimum, the Felony Sentences in State Courts report series. Urban Institute and their subcontractor, National Center for State Courts (NCSC) have already completed an assessment of the laws and rules regarding access to state court records, completed interviews with state court administrators to assess the availability of data, developed a sampling strategy, and conducted a pilot test of the collection. The purpose of this supplemental funding is to ensure that Urban Institute and NCSC can complete a full data collection, and analyze, report, and disseminate the data. (CA/NCF)

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

The Analysis of Publicly Available Court Data (APACD) seeks to assess the availability of publicly available court data, conduct a pilot study to collect these data, complete a full data collection, and analyze, report, and disseminate the data. The recipient of funds will examine a variety of sources of data, beginning with existing data extracts from state courts, data freely available on state court websites, then state court data repositories, publicly available court docket calendars, and state sentencing commissions. The focus of the effort is to reproduce, at a minimum, the Felony Sentences in State Courts report series. Therefore, the focus is primarily on criminal court data, though the effort can be expanded to limited civil court data if the data are easily accessible.

The recipient of funds will assess the laws and rules regarding access to state court records, use innovative methods to gather and assess state court data, assess whether the freely available court data can generate national estimates, determine alternate sources of data to reach national estimates, design a pilot study of publicly available court data, develop a nationally representative sampling strategy to collect court data, conduct a full data collection, and analyze, report, and disseminate the data.

Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined by applicable law. (CA/NCF)