Alaska Plea Bargaining Study, 1974-1976 (ICPSR 7714)

Principal Investigator(s): Clarke, Stevens H.

Summary: This study examines the characteristics of criminal offenders as they affect the primary outcomes of their court cases, particularly plea bargaining decisions. The study was conducted in Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks, Alaska, over a two-year period from August 1974 to August 1976. The data were collected from police booking sheets, public fingerprint files, and court dockets. The unit of observation is the felony case, i.e., a single felony charge against a single defendant. Each unit of data... (more info)

• This data is freely available.

Clarke, Stevens H. Alaska Plea Bargaining Study, 1974-1976. ICPSR07714-v2. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1997. doi:10.3886/ICPSR07714.v2

Persistent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07714.v2

Export Citation:

• RIS (generic format for RefWorks, EndNote, etc.)
• EndNote XML (EndNote X4.0.1 or higher)

This survey was funded by:

• United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (76-NI-10-0001)

Summary:   This study examines the characteristics of criminal offenders as they affect the primary outcomes of their court cases, particularly plea bargaining decisions. The study was conducted in Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks, Alaska, over a two-year period from August 1974 to August 1976. The data were collected from police booking sheets, public fingerprint files, and court dockets. The unit of observation is the felony case, i.e., a single felony charge against a single defendant. Each unit of data contains information about both the defendant and the charge. The variables include demographic and social characteristics of the offender, criminal history of the offender, nature of the offense, evidence, victim characteristics, and administrative factors related to the disposition of the case.

Subject Terms:   court cases, felons, felony offenses, offenders, plea negotiations

Geographic Coverage:   Alaska, United States

Time Period:  

• 1974--1976

Date of Collection:  

• 1974-08--1976-08

Data Types:   event/transaction data

Data Source:

police booking sheets, public fingerprint files, and court dockets

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:

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

Original ICPSR Release:  1984-05-03

Version History:

• 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.
• 1997-02-13 SAS and SPSS data definition statements are now available for this collection.

• List all 193 variables in this study

• Search the variables in this study

Use any of the notification links to add this study to your RSS feed; you will then receive notification if the study is substantively updated.

• Citations exports are provided above.

• Export Study-level metadata (does not include variable-level metadata)

  • DDI Codebook or DDI Lifecycle

  • Dublin Core

  • MARC21 XML

  • DataCite XML

If you're looking for collection-level metadata rather than an individual metadata record, please visit our Metadata Records page.

• View Usage of this Study