Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice Science, Practice, and Policy (2023) / Chapter Skim
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10 Data and Research Opportunities
10 Data and Research Opportunities
Pages 331-340
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From page 331... ...
With that need in mind, in this chapter we outline opportunities for building a data infrastructure that promotes integration across the criminal justice system and linkages with non-criminal justice data sources to better assess and support efforts to reduce racial inequalities. The chapter also highlights key areas where future research is needed to better understand racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system and to evaluate promising policies and programs for reducing inequalities.
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From page 332... ...
" Connecting all stages of an individual's experience through the criminal justice system in a jurisdiction, from the point of first encounter, through case processing and adjudication, through supervision, and finally to reentry is currently possible but only in a handful of jurisdictions, mainly those with grant-funded outside expertise. In addition, existing data collections undertaken by the Bureau of Justice Statistics are mainly cross-sectional in nature and focus on relatively narrow, individual parts of the criminal justice system.
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From page 333... ...
Data linkage also offers the opportunity of placing criminal justice involvement in the larger social contexts of demography and community. For example, linking criminal justice records to the census and many other federal data collections would greatly enrich the statistical portrait of criminal justice involvement.
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From page 334... ...
are not well documented in existing data collection efforts. For example, according to a survey of state criminal justice data conducted by the Urban Institute, 40 states reported race (e.g., "White," "Black," "other")
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From page 335... ...
The exposure to crime and the criminal justice status of American Indians is generally poorly documented and therefore constitutes an important priority for data collection. Incentives for Improving Data Quality and Transparency Data challenges are present at the federal, state, and local levels.
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From page 336... ...
have lacked either data collection or publication of results for five years or more. The lack of sufficient funding also hampers the agency's ability to keep current with rapidly advancing analytics methodologies and modern tools for linking data across sources.
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AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH Additional research is needed to enhance understanding of racial and ethnic disparities in crime and victimization and the inequalities both in and outside the system driving those differences. Moreover, as jurisdictions across the local, state, and federal levels continue to implement policies and programs to reduce disparities in their systems, those reforms will need to be evaluated to measure performance and assess outcomes with scientific rigor.
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From page 338... ...
From the perspective of developing a research agenda that can help reduce racial inequality, the committee supports a pluralistic approach that includes experiments along with observational studies, ethnographic and qualitative field research, and historical analysis. With such an agenda, researchers can employ methods from public health, demographic, sociological, qualitative, and participatory-action research in partnership with community members outside the research community.
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From page 339... ...
Ensuring that communities are included as a key constituency for data and research is an important next step for developing a scientific program that can positively contribute to reducing racial inequality.
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