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Survey of Prison Inmates, United States, 2016
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To fulfill part of its mission, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) conducted the Survey of Prison Inmates (SPI), a national, wide-ranging survey of prisoners age 18 or older who were incarcerated in state or federal correctional facilities within the United States. SPI provides national statistics on prisoner characteristics across a variety of domains, such as current offense and sentence, incident characteristics, firearm possession and sources, criminal history, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, family background, drug and alcohol use and treatment, mental and physical health and treatment, and facility programs and rules violations. SPI can also be used to track changes in these characteristics over time, describe special populations of prisoners, and identify policy-relevant changes in the state and federal prison populations. Formerly the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities (SISFCF), this survey was renamed SPI with the 2016 iteration.
Detailed Methodology
The 2016 SPI was a stratified two-stage sample design in which prisons were selected in the first stage and prisoners within sampled facilities were selected in the second stage. A total of 364 prisons (306 state and 58 federal) participated in the 2016 SPI out of 385 selected (324 state and 61 federal), which included 15 sampled prisons that were deemed ineligible. A total of 24,848 prisoners participated (20,064 state and 4,784 federal) in the 2016 SPI, based on a sample of 37,058 prisoners (30,348 state and 6,710 federal), which included 1,549 sampled prisoners who were deemed ineligible for the survey.