Using the Bureau of Justice Statistics: BJS Corrections Statistics & Info

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) collects data on persons held under sentence of death and persons executed during the calendar year from the state department of corrections and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, see Captial Punishment series. BJS also collects preliminary counts of executions during the following year to provide web users with the most recently available data, see Prisoners executed. This webpage summarizes the movement of prisoners into and out of death sentence status. The data describe offenders' sex, race, Hispanic origin, education, marital status, age at time of arrest for the capital offense, legal status at the time of the offense, and method of removal. The webpage also includes information on executions, trends, and time between imposition of death sentence and execution.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics maintains two annual data series, the Annual Probation Survey and the Annual Parole Survey, designed to provide national, federal, and jurisdiction-level data from administrative records of adults supervised in the community on probation or parole. Both data series also collect information on the characteristics of probationers and parolees.

The Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP) collects data on deaths that occur in the process of arrest, or while inmates are in the custody of local jails or state prisons. Local jail and state prison data are collected directly from jails and state departments of corrections. Arrest-related mortality data are collected separately from data on deaths that occur in prisons or jails. The DCRP provides individual-level data on the number of deaths by year, cause of death, and decedent age, race or Hispanic origin, and sex. These data are also used to produce facility and population mortality rates. The collection of individual-level data allows BJS to perform detailed analyses of comparative death rates across demographic categories and offense types, as well as facility and agency characteristics.

Corrections-related expenditure data are available from the Justice Assistance Data Survey (formerly Justice Expenditure and Employment Survey). Data on staffing is also collected in the Census of Jails and Census of State and Federal Correctional Facilities. See Data Collections & Surveys for more information. Both data collections face challenges in differing definitions between jurisdictions and in the ability to report full information – BJS notes known differences in resulting publications and tables.

BJS collects information on jail inmates and jail facilities from administrative records maintained by local jurisdictions and through periodic personal interviews with inmates held in local jails (see Jail Data Collections and Surveys for more information). Jails are correctional facilities that confine persons before or after adjudication and are usually operated by local law enforcement authorities. Jail sentences are usually for 1 year or less.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA; Public Law 108-79) requires the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to carry out a comprehensive statistical review and analysis of the incidence and effects of prison rape for each calendar year. BJS’s review must include, but is not limited to, the identification of the common characteristics of both victims and perpetrators of prison rape; and prisons and prison systems with a high incidence of prison rape.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) collects criminal history data from the FBI and state record repositories to study recidivism patterns of various offenders, including persons on probation or discharged from prison. The latest study of state prisoners estimated the recidivism patterns of about 400,000 persons released from state prisons in 30 states in 2005. The findings from the 2005 study cannot be directly compared to those from BJS's previous prisoner recidivism studies due to changes in the demographic characteristics and criminal histories of the U.S. prison population, an increase in the number of states in the study, and improvements made to the quality and completeness of the nation’s criminal history records since the mid-1990s. BJS has also used criminal history records to examine the recidivism of persons placed on federal community supervision in 2005.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) maintains several data collections on prisoners and prison facilities using administrative records maintained by the each state’s department of corrections and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and personal interviews with inmates in state and federal prisons (see Data Collections for a summary of these collections). State and federal prisoner populations differ from the jail inmate population in terms of conviction status, offense distribution, and average length of stay. The federal prisoner population is also unique from the state prisoner population, most notably in offense distribution. Similarly, prison facilities differ from local jail facilities in average size, treatment and programming resources, and crowding, among other characteristics. For more information, see Terms and Definitions.

The total correctional population consists of all offenders under the supervision of adult correctional systems, which includes offenders supervised in the community under the authority of probation or parole agencies and those held in the custody of state or federal prisons or local jails. Several different data collections are used to estimate the total correctional population including the National Prisoner Statistics Program, Annual Survey of Jails, Census of Jail Inmates, and Annual Probation Survey and Annual Parole Survey (listed under data sources). The basic count of the correctional population is updated annually in the Correctional Populations in the United States series.