nps_2019_supp statement_part B_final

2. Collection of Information Employing Statistical Methods

1. Universe and Respondent Selection

The NPS covers the entire universe of state and federal prisons, as well as prisons in U.S. territories. A form is sent to the research section of each state department of corrections and the Federal BOP and is usually completed by a statistician or research analyst. NPS does not include questions on individual private prisons or local jails, but we do collect aggregate counts of any state or federal prisoners held in these facilities (NPS-1B questions 3-5).

2. Procedures for Information Collection

Data collection mode is both a paper form sent directly to all state Departments of Correction and the Bureau of Prisons and a web option that resembles the form. Each jurisdiction has an individual password to enter the website and can view its own data, but no one else’s. The website will be hosted by Abt Associates, BJS’s data collection agent, and is located on a secure server. In 2019, eight jurisdictions emailed completed data forms directly to Abt Associates. The remaining jurisdictions submitted their data via the secure website.

The NPS-1B or NPS-1B(T) forms for collection of data in 2019, 2020, and 2021 will be sent out on December 15th of the reference year to the 56 jurisdictions, along with a cover letter from BJS explaining the importance of the survey (Appendices 2, 3, 7). Respondents will be asked to submit the data by the due date on the form (the last business day of February) via the secure online website (screenshots from the 2018 collection in Appendix 4), fax, or mail. Abt Associates will receive and check the submitted survey data. If data are not received by the due date, Abt Associates will send a reminder email asking jurisdictions to submit their data as soon as possible (Appendix 5).

Jurisdictions are contacted via email approximately 10 weeks prior to publication of the annual report with eight BJS tabulations of the NPS data (Appendix 6). Jurisdictions are asked to verify only their own statistics, and never asked to provide additional information or make any calculations. The purpose of this verification is simply to allow jurisdictions to understand how their data will be presented to the public, and to communicate with BJS regarding any concerns they may have.

3. Methods to Maximize Response

Over the years, BJS has had a greater than 95% response rate for NPS. When a state does not report to NPS, BJS has used official department of corrections (DOC) reports to impute sex-specific prison custody and jurisdiction population counts, as well as numbers of admissions and releases for these years. New Mexico and North Dakota did not report data for the 2017 calendar year, and New Hampshire and Oregon have not submitted data for 2018. In all cases, BJS has reached out to the directors of the Departments of Corrections to attempt to encourage participation. This practice has generally resulted in the reporting of data by those states in the subsequent years.

4. Test of Procedures or Methods

There is one change to the NPS-1B questions at this time: to better understand the number of persons in prison who are of unknown U.S. citizenship, BJS will add a question on the number of U.S. citizens disaggregated by sentence length, similar to the current question for non-U.S. citizens. Adding a question on citizens will allow jurisdictions to accurately report the number of known citizens and non-citizens. The new question will begin by asking the total number of U.S. citizens and non-citizens, and then request the breakdown of each by sentence length:

Early stage scoping interviews conducted with 18 states under BJS’s generic clearance (OMB #0607-0725) in 2015 for BJS’s prison facility census collection included questions on whether they obtained citizenship status for inmates, and the source of these data. All 18 confirmed that they had a citizenship indicator on their offender management software for each prisoner, although the majority said that the information was based on self-report at admission to prison, and there was no subsequent verification with external sources. Informal discussions with 7 current NPS data providers in 2019 indicated that all would be able to provide the disaggregation of U.S. citizen prisoners by sentence length, and that doing so would require an additional 30 minutes of burden during the first year of data collection (2019 data, collected during 2020) to alter their data extraction programs.

5. Consultation Information

The Correction Statistics Unit at BJS is responsible for the overall design and management of the activities described in this submission, including fielding of the survey, data cleaning, and data analysis. BJS contacts include:

Elizabeth Ann Carson

Corrections Statistics Unit

Bureau of Justice Statistics

U.S. Department of Justice

810 Seventh St, NW

Washington, DC 20531

(202) 616-3496

Devon Adams

Acting Deputy Director

Bureau of Justice Statistics

U.S. Department of Justice

810 Seventh St, NW

Washington, DC 20531

(202) 307-0765