Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2019, $74,892)
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 Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) is the State Administrative Agency (SAA) which also houses the states SAC. The SAC will use SJS funds for one core capacity project (GIS-Mapping Enhancement).
For the GIS-Mapping Enhancement project, PCCD will use SJS funds to use GIS-mapping to enhance their visual representation of data, which will build upon the current PCCDs digital dashboards (previously 2015 SJS funded) and GIS-mapping projects (2016 and 2018 SJS funded). PCCDs SAC hosts a wide range of publicly available criminal justice data and statistics and mapping the data will enhance the visualization and data analysis in addition to increasing the availability to the public. Since using GIS-mapping in 2015, the spatial analysis of data allows policy-makers to identify gaps in service and assist in the strategic development of solutions to meet those needs in addition to finding it is a valuable tool for detailed data analysis.
For 2019, the PCCD intends to build on the GIS-mapping with five additional enhancements: 1) the youth survey application for measuring risks and protective factors to nearly 400 schools; 2) the school safety and security survey analysis to ascertain the level of school safety and security preparedness; 3) using GIS-mapping to understand the geographical distribution of school safety and security grant program funding; 4) using GIS-mapping to determine the recidivism rate of state-funded county intermediate punishment (CIP) programs; and 5) using GIS-mapping to determine the recidivism rate of county prison and adult probation in Cumberland County.
(CA/NCF)