Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS)

The Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) is an internal Census Bureau project with the ambition of creating a national, integrated, harmonized collection of criminal justice microdata at the Census Bureau. The project is a joint effort with the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. CJARS started in 2016 with funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation now funds the project.

The project has three fundamental goals: (1) improve Census Bureau operations; (2) provide valuable aggregate statistical information to criminal justice agencies; and (3) increase the quality and quantity of criminal justice research by making the data available through the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers.

CJARS is using three types of data collection mechanisms: data-use agreements, downloads of public data online, and public information requests. So far, CJARS has collected data on 57 million criminal justice events from agencies in 14 states dating back to the 1970s.

At the University of Michigan, CJARS collects longitudinal electronic records from criminal justice agencies and harmonizes these records to track a criminal episode across all stages of the system. At the U.S. Census Bureau, harmonized criminal justice records can be linked anonymously at the person-level with extensive social,demographic, and economic information from national survey and administrative records.

The CJARS data platform is built on individual-level records created in the normal course of the criminal justice system, such as arrest reports, court case processing, and correctional records. These data are harmonized into a common national format in order to support tracking individuals over the sequence of their criminal justice events and across jurisdictional boundaries.

Note: This dataset is from a third party source. The project review timeframes above do not apply to applications that request access to confidential data assets commingled with data that are either not owned, or are only co-owned, by the statistical agency(s) or unit(s) and require approval from third parties not subject to this policy (e.g., state and local government agencies)