Offender Based Transaction Statistics (OBTS), 1981: California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, Minnesota, New York, and Virginia (ICPSR 8277)

Version Date: Aug 8, 2005

Cite this study |

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

Series:

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08277.v5

Version V5

Slide tabs to view more

Alternate Title

OBTS 1981

Summary

Offender Based Transaction Statistics (OBTS) studies are designed to collect information by tracking adult offenders from the point of entry into the criminal justice system (typically by arrest) through final disposition, regardless of whether the offender is convicted or acquitted. Information is provided on arrest, police action, prosecutor action, level of charges, charges filed by the prosecutor, type of counsel, pretrial status, type of trial, sentence type, and sentence length. This allows researchers to examine how the criminal justice system processes offenders, to measure the changing volume of offenders moving through the different segments of the criminal justice system, to calculate processing time intervals between major decision-making events, and to assess the changing structure of the offender population.

Citation

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Offender Based Transaction Statistics (OBTS), 1981: California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, Minnesota, New York, and Virginia. [distributor], 2005-08-08. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08277.v5

Export Citation:

  • RIS (generic format for RefWorks, EndNote, etc.)
  • EndNote

Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Restrictions

Access to these BJS-sponsored data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a NACJD Restricted Data Use Agreement available from the ResearchDataGov website, specify the reasons for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Restricted Data Use Agreements available on the NACJD website are provided for reference only. Please visit the ResearchDataGov website to download the appropriate Restricted Data Use Agreement and submit your request. Once approved, data may be accessed from a requester secure site via ICPSR's secure download procedures.

Hide

Time Period(s)

1981

Date of Collection

1981

Data Collection Notes

  1. For reasons of confidentiality, the "day" variables in the dates have been blanked in the public release version of the data. Consequently, additional variables have been created to provide the elapsed time between the day of arrest and the days of the police disposition, the prosecutor/grand jury disposition, the final court disposition, and the sentencing date.

Hide

Universe

Persons in the United States who have achieved adult status (as specified by individual state laws) and who have been processed for felonies by the police, prosecutors, or courts, whether or not there is a final determination of guilt.

Data Source

computerized court records

Data Type(s)

Hide

Original Release Date

1984-11-14

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. OFFENDER BASED TRANSACTION STATISTICS (OBTS), 1981: CALIFORNIA, OHIO, PENNSYLVANIA, UTAH, MINNESOTA, NEW YORK, AND VIRGINIA. Compiled by Regional Justice Information System. ICPSR08277-v5. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 2005-08-08. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08277.v5

2005-08-08 The data were reprocessed using resupplied data. Old ICPSR administrative variables were removed. The variables "Date of Arrest: Day," "Date of Police Disp: Day," "Date Prosec Dispos: Day," "Date Final Court Disp: Day," and "Sentencing Date: Day," previously removed from the data, have been included in the data files. A public version of the data has been created in which the Day variables are blanked and a restricted version of the data has been created in which the Day variables have not been blanked. Also, Part 2, which was an old frequency file, has been removed. The codebook and all the SAS, SPSS, and Stata collection files have been updated to reflect the changes.

1997-04-14 SAS data definition statements are now available for this collection and the SPSS data definition statements were updated.

1984-11-14 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.
Hide

Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

  • One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.