Letter to Respondents

December 31, 2009

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Dear 3:

I am writing to ask your continued participation in our National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP). The Census Bureau, our collection agent for the NCRP, is collecting data for calendar year 2009.

I also want to thank you for participating in the NCRP. I recognize that your participation in the program is voluntary and that responding to my requests for data places burdens on you and your staff. I most gratefully appreciate your efforts. I also want you to know that your assistance in providing us with NCRP data is critical to enabling BJS to describe accurately the nation's correctional populations, in both point-in-time studies, and longitudinal investigations made possible by the repeated annual submissions you have made. I note that the 2009 collection year marks the 27th year of the NCRP collection.

Previously, we have used the NCRP data in special reports, and they have been used extensively to study truth-in-sentencing. Currently, we use them for a variety of purposes. Perhaps most notably, we use NCRP data to help us track and document changes in the offense, gender, age, and race/Hispanic origin of prison populations (such as the increase in the number and share of white women in prison). We are using them in a study of parole outcomes as they relate to the attributes of offenders. We also plan to implement two major recidivism studies that will be based upon the NCRP data.

Therefore, I ask that you please submit your data to the Census Bureau by March 31, 2010. I also want to remind you that, as provided under Title 42 of the United States Code, Section 3789, we and our collection agent will hold in strict confidentiality any data that you provide to us that could be used to identify individuals.

If you need any assistance regarding your data submission, please contact Steve Bittner or Colette Heiston at the Census Bureau at 1-800-221-1829. If you have any questions or if I can be of any assistance, please feel free to call me at (202)514-1062 or Tom Bonczar, the NCRP project manager at (202) 616-3615.

Sincerely,

William J. Sabol, Ph.D., Chief

Corrections Statistics Program

Enclosures