FY 2020 Georgia State Justice Statistics Program

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 State of Georgia’s Statistical Analysis Center (GASAC), which is housed in the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, the state administering agency (SAA).

Under FY 20 SJS project, the GA SAC will conduct four (4) Core Capacity projects that use NIBRS data to conduct analysis with in the state. The GSAC will build upon their past three (3) years’ experience working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) (the UCR state reporting agency) and local law enforcement agencies in Georgia that are making the transition to NIBRS. As part of that endeavor, the GSAC gained access to agencies’ NIBRS submissions to GBI as they are made for the purposes of data quality assessment. Given their established relationships with local agencies and RMS providers, GSAC has built a conduit for sharing the findings from their data quality assessments that allows them to provide guidance and technical assistance (as needed) to inform necessary changes to NIBRS reports from local agencies. GSAC will help agencies analyze their NIBRS data. GSAC acknowledges that the specific topics may vary over time, but initially they propose a set of studies in which they aim to address needs and interests of state and local agencies, the Governor of Georgia, and BJS.

In project two (2), the GSAC conduct a Special Emphasis project to analyze state criminal history records. Specifically, and given the concerns surrounding recidivism, understanding the scope of issues underlying mental health service utilization is of growing interest to policy makers. Although service provision has demonstrated to affect both mental health outcome and recidivism rates, inmates appear to experience more difficulty in obtaining health insurance that could assist in accessing these services upon release. Moreover, a recent study suggests that jail inmates are denied Medicaid coverage at higher rates than both prison inmates and psychiatric patients. To circumvent low coverage approval rates, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) funds a national program dedicated to increasing Medicaid approval across the U.S. The SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery (SOAR) method utilizes in-depth medical and personal summaries of disability to facilitate in the SSI application process. To date, the SOAR method has been implemented in several states and has an average Medicaid approval rate of 65% as of 2019.

The GSAC will conduct year one of a three-year project using computerized criminal history data to assess recidivism and re-arrest for persons who qualify for SSI/SSDI and successfully receive benefits. (CA/NCF)