MDI’s Linkage Seminar Series Presents: Building the Next-Gen Data Platform for Research and Reporting on the US Justice System
You are invited to
MDI’s Linkage Seminar Series Presents: Building the Next-Gen Data Platform for Research and Reporting on the US Justice System
Thursday, February 25
1-2 PM ET
Zoom Webinar
For the next installment of the Linkage Seminar series, Amy O’Hara at the Massive Data Institute will join Mike Mueller-Smith, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, who founded a new data platform called the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS). CJARS is creating a nationally integrated data repository following justice-involved individuals through the criminal justice system, which can be linked with extensive socio-economic data held by the US Census Bureau. CJARS has the potential to revolutionize research and statistical reporting on the US criminal justice system, but validation, which has been a key focus of Mike’s work recently, is critical to ensuring accuracy and reliability of this new data resource. Amy and Mike will discuss:
Strategies for data collection from public agencies without a mandate to compel participation
Triaging provider-supplied data formats and codes
Balancing detail and nuance versus consistency in the national data schema (i.e. what we are coding raw data to) when state/local criminal justice systems operate quite differently (or vary in their level of detail in their available data)
Managing massive amounts of free entry fields (e.g. 4.1 million unique offense descriptions)
Developing a system for entity resolution with limited PII and no reliable unique identifiers
Guest Speaker:Mike Mueller-Smith
Mike Mueller-Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan and Faculty Associate at the Population Studies Center. His research focuses on measuring the scope and prevalence of the criminal justice system in the U.S. as well as its broadly defined impact on the population. He is the Director of the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), a new data infrastructure project joint with the U.S. Census Bureau that seeks to collect and link extensive amounts of criminal justice microdata with social and economic data held at the Census Bureau. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 2015, and completed a NICHD Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Michigan’s Population Studies Center between 2015-2017.