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The Interpersonal Violence and Institutional Misconduct in Jails Study is a longitudinal evaluation of administrative data collected from the Los Angeles County Jail System. This study includes aggregate monthly information on the number and rate of incidents of interpersonal violence and serious institutional misconduct in the Los Angeles County Jail System over an eight-year time period (January 2010 to December 2017). This investigation also includes information on the development and validation of two separate risk assessment tools--the Inmate Risk Assessment for Perpetration (IRAP) and the Inmate Risk Assessment for Victimization (IRAV)--that were designed to help authorities proactively identify the perpetrators and victims of interpersonal violence in jail, respectively. The subjects used to construct and test these instruments were an admission cohort of all adjudicated inmates entering the Los Angeles County jail system in 2016 (N = 104,919). This population of inmates was randomly assigned into one of four groups. The first was the construction sample (n = 26,404), which was used to create the two risk assessment scales, and the other three served as cross-validation samples, which each served to evaluate the predictive accuracy and reliability of these instruments. These data include individual-level information on inmate demographics, criminal history, and other measures of institutional behavior.

With the growing popularity, technological ease of using propensity score modeling (PSM), and the concern over its reliability and validity among scholars and practitioners, the researchers aimed to answer whether PSM methods can replicate the results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In this secondary data analysis, the researchers gathered the datasets of 10 publicly available and restricted RCT studies from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), introduced an artificial selection bias into the treatment groups of these investigations, and then used each PSM technique to remove this selection bias. The team then compared the results generated from the PSM methods to those derived from the original RCT experiments, and meta-analyzed the findings across all studies to reveal the true reliability and validity of PSM in relation to RCTs using criminal justice data.

For each study used in this analysis, the researchers created SPSS syntax for variable recodes and artificial bias creation and a codebook with original study items, recoded variables, and analytic variables. (In one study, two RCTs were conducted and thus two sets of syntax and codebooks were created.) Seven text files contain the Stata and R code used to run each PSM technique. These materials have been zipped into a package and are available for restricted download. Please refer to the ICPSR README for more information.