Capital Punishment in the United States, 1973-1991

Principal Investigator(s): United States Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics

Summary: This data collection provides annual data on prisoners under a sentence of death and on those whose offense sentences were commuted or vacated during the period 1973-1991. Information is supplied for basic sociodemographic characteristics such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status at time of imprisonment, level of education, and state of incarceration. Criminal history data include prior felony convictions for criminal homicide and legal status at the time of the capital off... (more info)

Series: Capital Punishment in the United States Series

One or more files in this study are not available for download due to special restrictions; consult the restrictions note to learn more. Additional information can also be found in the Use Agreement.

The data are restricted from general dissemination. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a restricted data Use Agreement form and specify the reasons for the request. A copy of the Restricted Data Use Agreement form can be requested by calling 800-999-0960. Researchers can also download this form as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file from the download page associated with this dataset. Completed forms should be returned to: Director, National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Institute for Social Research, P.O. Box 1248, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248, or by fax: 734-647-8200.

Dataset

Documentation:

Codebook.pdf User agreement.pdf

Download:

No downloadable data files available.

United States Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment in the United States, 1973-1991. ICPSR06514-v2. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2008-11-12. doi:10.3886/ICPSR06514.v1

Persistent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06514.v1

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Summary: This data collection provides annual data on prisoners under a sentence of death and on those whose offense sentences were commuted or vacated during the period 1973-1991. Information is supplied for basic sociodemographic characteristics such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status at time of imprisonment, level of education, and state of incarceration. Criminal history data include prior felony convictions for criminal homicide and legal status at the time of the capital offense. Additional information is available for inmates removed from death row by yearend 1991 and for inmates who were executed.

Subject Terms: capital punishment, commuted sentences, criminal histories, death row inmates, demographic characteristics, executions, felony offenses, prison inmates, sentencing, states (USA)

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period:

1973--1991

Date of Collection:

1992

Universe: All inmates on death row since 1972 in the United States.

Data Types: event/transaction data

Data Collection Notes:

The inmate identification numbers were assigned by the Bureau of the Census and have no purpose outside this data collection.

Data Source:

official prison records collected for the National Prisoner Statistics reporting series

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.
Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Original ICPSR Release: 1995-10-30

Version History:

2008-11-12 Minor changes have been made to the metadata.
2008-10-30 All parts have been moved to restricted access and are available only using the restricted access procedures.
2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable, and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to reflect these additions.