State and Federal Corrections Information Systems: An Inventory of Data Elements and an Assessment of Reporting Capabilities

Reports on a recently completed inventory of information systems in State and Federal departments of adult corrections intended to establish a basis for improving the capacity to provide comparable data and to facilitate cross-jurisdictional research. Conducted by the Urban Institute, the study addresses concerns raised by the State-Federal Committee of the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) about the absence of common definitions of corrections performance measures and lack of knowledge about what correctional information systems actually contain. The report organizes 207 offender-based data elements into four stages of corrections processing and then into 28 groupings of relatively homogeneous elements.