Arizona Statistical Analysis Center Core Capacity and Special Emphasis Projects, 2018

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 Arizona SAC (AZSAC), housed within the AZ Criminal Justice Commission (ACJC) will use SJS funds to support two core capacity building projects: 1) Enhancing the Community Data Portal (CDP) with Tableau; and 2) Understanding AZ’s Recidivism Rate; and one special emphasis project: Assessing the Impact of Failure to Appears (FTAs) on criminal history records (CHR) completeness.

For the CDP Enhancement project, the AZSAC will update and enhance the CDP with a transition to the Tableau platform. The CDP was developed in 2010 and is hosted on the ACJC website and serves as a repository for a variety of drug, crime, and criminal justice-related data for policymakers and practitioners through the use of a web-based data dissemination tool. The update and enhancement will expand the capacity and reach of the CDP by increasing substance, crime and criminal justice data in a more interactive and user-friendly way. The current format of the CDP requires extensive time for updating data through an Excel spreadsheet that is then transferred to the website. The Tableau platform will allow the SAC staff to create data dashboards from existing data, automate data updates to CDP, and develop new dashboards for displaying data which will improve the process and access to information for policy-makers and stakeholders.

For the study of recidivism rates, the AZSAC will work with the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) to obtain a cohort of individuals released from the ADC, and create a report assessing the recidivism rate of that cohort at one, two, and three years’ post-release. The AZSAC will calculate the 3-year recidivism rate for inmates released from ADC in FY15 and will address 2 key questions: 1) what is the current rate of recidivism in AZ; and 2) what factors are correlated with the recidivism of individuals released from prison in AZ. Using data from the ADC, a logistic regression analysis will be conducted to determine factors that predict recidivism. Variables selected for analysis will be derived from theoretical and empirical research on recidivism, and the AZSAC will work with the ADC to determine all necessary data is included in the data extract provided to AZSAC.

For the special emphasis project assessing the impact of FTAs on CHR completeness, the AZSAC will identify the proportion of pending FTA charges with a subsequent disposition which will determine the impact on the overall ACCH record completeness. The AZSAC will work along with AZ’s Department of Public Safety (AZDPS), the state repository of local criminal history, to extract the ACCH data. The project will focus on the process of how FTA charges are managed through the criminal justice system and expose any possible solutions to improving how dispositions are completed and eventual decrease the gap in records completeness.

(CA/NCF)