Corrections Telecommunication and Technology
F. Warren Benton, Ph.D.
Access the entire collection at the CTT Web Site.
Counting and measuring is a central part of correctional management. At the heart of our security
process is "The Count" -- the routine counting of prisoners and the reconciliation of the physical
count official counts. We also count keys, weapons, posts, meals, cells, trips, and more.
Correctional staff in community-based programs also must strictly account for their operations.
In the past, there have been several primary sources of quantitative information about
correctional operations. The United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics,
issued routine bulletins and reports about federal, state, and local correctional facilities,
programs, and populations. The American Correctional Association also published statistical
summaries in their Directories. However, these and other resources normally existed only on
paper, or in computer-based archives that were not easily accessible for casual users. .
Today, the internet provides new sources of statistical information, easily available, in formats
that can be readily used in spreadsheet programs and other software packages easily available to
casual users. In this column I will review some of the best sites for data about corrections on the
internet.
Bureau of Justice Statistics is the Place to Start
The Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice is the place to start. This site is excellent today, and it is
constantly being improved. The following are reasons why this site is excellent:
The site provides a justice context for statistics about corrections. Statistics about crime,
law enforcement, and sentencing provide a framework to understand correctional statistics.
The site has a subsection devoted to corrections,
Bureau of Justice Statistics: Corrections which includes data about capital punishment, jails,
prisons, probation, and parole.
Statistics can be downloaded (copied to your computer) in various formats. One web
page, called Corrections Electronic Data Abstracts provides links to spreadsheet files about
corrections in wk1 (lotus 123) format. While the format is an older one, it is almost universally
recognized by newer spreadsheet programs, so that the files can be opened in practically any
program or computer.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics Corrections Data Collections are linked from the BJS corrections
data page described above. These datasets cover ongoing reporting programs of the Bureau, such
as the "Survey of Inmates in Local Jails" and the "Census of State and Local Prisons". Because of
the nature of the studies, the datasets are large, and the formats are less user-friendly. Familiarity
with statistical analysis programs such as SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is
almost a necessity.
BJS links to ICPSR for industrial-strength data
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), located within the
Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan , is a membership-based,
not-for-profit organization serving member colleges and universities in the United States and
abroad. ICPSR provides:
University of Virginia provides access to Census Data
Sometimes, raw statistics about corrections do not make much sense without being placed in
context. For example, a comparison of prison receptions between several states does not make
much sense unless the comparisions take into consideration the relative population sizes of the
states involved. To get general information about states, counties, and cities, the best source of
information is the United States Census.
However, one of my favorite sites is the Social Sciences Data Center of the University of
Virginia Library. It provides an excellent
resource of obtaining general social science data in a format that can be read into your computer.
The advantage of this site is that you can identify the exact information that you want, along with
the format that you want it in, and the web site generates your dataset file expressly for you to
download.
Another source of general statistical information is a web site maintained by the University of
California at San Diego, called Data on the Net. This site
contains links to 772 Internet sites of numeric Social Science statistical data, data catalogs, data
libraries, social science gateways, addresses and more.
Finally, another source of federally maintained statistical information is a web site called
FedStats. At this site, the Federal Interagency Council on
Statistical Policy maintains links to over 70 sites where statistics are maintained of public use.
Finally, what do you do with the data once you have captured it?
Statlib is a comprehensive listing of links to statistics resources on the internet, maintained by Michael Meyer at Carnegie Mellon University. The Statistics page
of the WWW Virtual Library is a similar list of Web resources about statistics. Both of these sites provide links to resources about
statistical analysis.
Statistics on the Web -- what the future holds
Duke University maintains a JAVA site that provides a vision of the future for numbercrunchers. This site provides links to statistical
applications that are written in JAVA, which is a language designed to be compatible with a wide
range of computers. These applications run directly on most web browsers. Several years from
now, I envision that, in addition to corrections data, web sites will also contain specialized
programs to analyze corrections data.
Just the Facts -- Corrections Data on the Internet
by F. Warren Benton, Ph.D.
Copyright Corrections Managers' Report, October/November 1997
ICPSR is not designed for the casual or novice user. However, for planning and research
professionals, the site is excellent.