Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) - State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS)

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Data Collection: State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS)

Status: Active
Frequency: Biennially
Latest data available: 2006

Formerly National Pretrial Reporting Program (through 1994), SCPS provides data on the criminal justice processing of persons charged with felonies in 40 jurisdictions representative of the 75 largest counties. These counties account for about half of the serious crime nationwide. The program prospectively tracks felony defendants from charging by the prosecutor until disposition of their cases or for a maximum of 12 months for non-murder cases and 24 months for murder cases. Data are obtained on demographic characteristics, arrest offense, criminal justice status at time of arrest, prior arrests and convictions, bail and pretrial release, court appearance record, rearrests while on pretrial release, type and outcome of adjudication, and type and length of sentence.

BJS has issued a data advisory on the State Court Processing Statistics Data Limitations. The advisory describes limitations of the data collection that must be considered when analyzing SCPS data, drawing any conclusions based on the data, and citing BJS reports.

On This Page

Data Experts
Collection Period
Documentation

Methodology

Changes Over Time

Publications & Products

Related Topics

Data Experts

Thomas Cohen, Statistician, BJS

Tracey Kyckelhahn, Statistician, BJS

Collection Period

1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006

Documentation

Codebooks and Datasets

Methodology

The SCPS sample is a 2-stage stratified sample, with 40 of the 75 largest counties selected at stage one and a systematic sample of state court felony filings (defendants) within each county selected at stage two. The 40 counties were divided into 4 stage one strata based on court filing information. Ten counties were included in the sample with certainty because of their large number of court filings (though one was dropped due to data quality issues in 2006). The remaining counties were allocated to the three noncertainty strata based on the variance of felony court dispositions.

Changes Over Time

For the 2009 SCPS data collection BJS will examine the feasibility of different electronic methods of data collection and possible expansion of the information collected.

Publications & Products

The following publications and products were generated by BJS using data from this collection.

Publications
Data Tables
Press Releases

Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 2006 Presents data collected from a representative sample of felony cases filed in the nation's 75 most populous counties during May 2006.
	Acrobat file (PDF 1.61M) \| ASCII file (43K) \| Spreadsheets (Zip format 50K) Part of the Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties Series
Profile of Intimate Partner Violence Cases in Large Urban Counties Examines the characteristics and processing of 3,750 cases of intimate partner violence, filed in the state courts of 16 large urban counties in May 2002.
	Press Release \| PDF (1.4M) \| ASCII file (25K) \| Spreadsheet (16K)
Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 2004 Presents data collected from a representative sample of felony cases filed in the nation's 75 largest counties during May 2004.
	PDF (86K) \| Spreadsheet (5K) \| To order paper version Part of the Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties Series
State Court Processing of Domestic Violence Cases Examines the processing of domestic violence (DV) and non-domestic violence (non-DV) cases filed in May 2002 in 15 large urban counties.
	Press Release \| PDF (221K) \| ASCII file (24K) \| Spreadsheet (Zip format 11K) \| To order paper version
Pretrial Release of Felony Defendants in State Courts Presents findings on the pretrial release phase of the criminal justice process using data collected from a representative sample of felony cases filed in the 75 largest U.S. counties in May during even-numbered years from 1990 to 2004.
	PDF (201K) \| ASCII file (37K) \| Spreadsheet (Zip format 23K) \| To order paper version
Violent Felons in Large Urban Counties Presents data collected from a representative sample of felony cases that resulted in a felony conviction for a violent offense in 40 of the Nation's 75 largest counties.
	Press Release \| PDF (253K) \| ASCII file (22K) \| ZIP Format (Spreadsheet 18K) \| To order paper version
Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 2002 Presents data collected from a representative sample of felony cases filed in the Nation's 75 largest counties during May 2002.
	PDF (1.2M) \| Spreadsheet (Zip format 64K) \| To order paper version Part of the Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties Series
State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) Program,1990-98 (CD-ROM) This CD includes biennial data on the processing of felony defendants in State courts of the Nation's 75 most populous counties.
	HTML \| To order paper version Part of the Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties Series
Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 2000 Presents data collected from a representative sample of felony cases filed in 40 of the Nation's 75 largest counties during May 2000.
	PDF (335K) \| ASCII file (40K) \| Spreadsheet (Zip format 63K) \| Codebooks and Datasets \| To order paper version Part of the Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties Series
Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 1998 Presents data collected from a representative sample of felony cases filed in the Nation's 75 largest counties during May 1998.
	PDF (461K) \| ASCII file (77K) \| Spreadsheet (Zip format 131K) \| Codebooks and Datasets Part of the Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties Series

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