Matthew J. Hickman, Ph.D., Joseph L. Peterson

February 23, 2005    NCJ 207205

Reports on the organization, functions, budget and expenditures, staffing, workload, and forensic backlog in the Nation's more than 350 publicly funded crime labs. Additional topics included in this report examine contracting with external laboratories, quality control, training and research conducted by public forensic laboratories. The report compliments earlier data collections and statistical reports from BJS documenting similar issues in forensic DNA laboratories. 

Highlights:

• Ninety-one percent of outsourced requests were DNA-related, including nearly 13,000 casework requests and 205,000 convicted offender samples in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).
• A typical laboratory in 2002 started the year with a backlog of about 390 requests, received 4,900 requests, and completed 4,600 requests.
• Forty-one percent of publicly funded labs in 2002 reported outsourcing one or more types of forensic services to private labs.

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