CAREER: Advancing knowledge on the U.S. Justice System through CJARS

The social and economic cost of crime in the U.S. and across the globe is very high and affects groups differently. This CAREER award will fund research that uses a large new data set constructed from the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) combined with other large data sets and innovative economic methods to answer questions about the effects of contacts with the criminal justice system (CJS) on many life outcomes. Among the issues to be investigated are: (i) how the risk of involvement in the CJS has changed over time and across space; (ii) how CJS involvement affect household instability for minor children; (iii) the implication of mass incarceration for retirement in the future; (iv) the effects of CJS involvement on returns to small business loans. The educational component involves intensive training of researchers and policy makers to use the CJARS data. The results of this research will provide a better understanding of how the criminal justice system affects the lives of ordinary people as well as provide input into designing better criminal justice policies. The results will improve the lives of many Americans as well as help establish the US as a global leader in criminal justice reforms. This award funds research that leverages recently linked criminal justice data from CJARS to study how involvement in the justice system shapes the lives of individuals, families, and their communities in the U.S. The research seeks to answer the following questions: (i) how has the risk of CJS involvement changed over recent decades and by local geography? (ii) does CJS involvement impact household instability for minor children? (iii) what are the effects of the rise in mass incarceration for retirement in the coming decades? (iv) does CJS involvement affect returns on investment for small business loans for entrepreneurs? and (v) how accurate is race and ethnicity data collected for operational purposes in the CJS and what are the implications of poor data quality? A common theme in the research is the integration of national administrative and survey data paired with natural experiments to exploit exogenous policy variation. The project will also develop training workshops to expand the number of researchers and policy makers using CJARS to study the causes and consequences of crime and the justice system in the U.S. The results of this research will provide a better understanding of how the criminal justice system affects the lives of ordinary people as well as provide input into designing better CJS policies. The results will improve the lives of many Americans as well as help establish the US as a global leader in criminal justice reforms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.