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Abstract:
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The Federal Justice Statistics Program is managed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and serves as the national clearinghouse of administrative federal criminal case processing data. Under this program, data are received from six federal justice agencies each year and are standardized, maintained, linked, analyzed, and archived. BJS uses identifiers from these data sources to create link files that offer researchers interested in studying the case processing of federal defendants a new way to investigate a range of issues affecting policy, theory, and practice. This presentation describes the linked files—a set of cross-walks that provide the researcher with the ability to track suspects forward (e.g., from arrest to subsequent processing stages) and backward (e.g., from sentencing to earlier stages); the link rates, and potential applications for enhancing federal immigration statistics. The goal is to promote the use of the BJS FJSP data and its linking system for external researchers and to share our experiences with others who have similar issues linking records across diverse data.
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