Principles to Guide National Data Collection on the Health of Persons in the Criminal Justice System

Few national data collection efforts have provided public health data on the criminal justice–involved population (defined hereinafter). The Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency in the US Department of Justice, routinely collects, analyzes, and disseminates data on health and mortality in prisons and jails to monitor trends and inform policy and planning. Agencies such as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism direct or conduct surveys of the currently noninstitutionalized population to characterize substance use among persons with a history of criminal justice involvement. Most national public health data collection systems exclude persons in correctional facilities and do not record information about previous involvement in the criminal justice system, such as the number of arrests and incarcerations or how much time was spent on probation and parole. We need to expand the collection of national data on the health of the criminal justice-involved population. To make sure that the data collected effectively address the needs of various stakeholders, it is important to identify the purposes for their collection. Defining the purposes would help ensure that the data elements and frequency of collection are consistent with the intended uses of this information. This practice is particularly important for health data related to the criminal justice system because of the unique ethical, logistical, timing, and scientific challenges involved in collecting data in these settings. Such challenges also make adhering to established principles of public health data collection more difficult. Thus, the Bureau of Justice Statistics supported a project to identify the major purposes for collecting data on the criminal justice population and to define fundamental principles for collecting data on this population. The findings of this project were presented at a 2016 workshop hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on how to improve the collection of health data among persons involved in the criminal justice system. We summarize the findings here.