Justice Quarterly

Understanding the Evolving State of Administrative Data for Criminal Justice Research

Administrative data used in criminal justice research often include recorded information from police reports (e.g., suspect and incident characteristics), court records (e.g., pretrial dispositions and sentences), and institutional or community corrections agencies (e.g., risk classifications, conditions of confinement or supervision). Most criminal justice agencies now have electronic databases with information for entire populations of suspects, defendants, and correctional clients, saving researchers the time and challenge of coding this information by hand. These data, therefore, are often used due to ease of being able to examine already-existing information. But they also come with limitations. For example, there are reliability and validity concerns related to the magnitude and distribution of missing data, clerical errors when information is entered, challenges in merging data that is typically not created for research purposes, and misunderstanding of what precisely particular information field codes mean.

In contemporary times, stronger partnerships between criminal justice agencies and academics have increased researcher access to administrative data as well as broadened the scope and types of information that are now available. In addition, many agencies have moved to real-time data systems. This evolution of easier access to more complete and recent information for larger numbers of cases means that researchers will likely increasingly rely on such data. The end result is not clear. Many benefits for, but also possible harms to, scholarship and policy may result.

This special issue is intended to promote understanding of advantages and disadvantages of administrative data for advancing theory and investigating critical issues in policing, courts, and corrections. Papers will need to make clear, important, and broad-reaching contributions, not just advancements or insights limited to the specific agency or records of focus.

We are interested in papers focused on the following and related topics:

1. Studies of law-making, policing, courts, and corrections that have been made possible through improvements in agency data over the past two decades.
2. Research that compares old versus new agency data in terms of the reliability and validity issues often associated with these data.
3. Analyses that illuminate or leverage opportunities to generate new or better measures, and that, in turn, allow greater understanding of the factors that may be central to more fully and accurately explaining critical aspects and impacts of law-making, policing, courts, and corrections. To illustrate, some new jail or prison database systems may provide more detailed incident or individual-level data capturing, for example, due process guarantees or violations.
4. Accounts that describe problems that have emerged with administrative data due to current record keeping practices. For example, has the evolution in record-keeping potentially improved but also worsened different types of data or created new problems for research?