Workshop - Keith Finlay, US Census Bureau, Labor Economist

About the Presentation

With six million individuals under correctional supervision and hundreds of billions of dollars in public justice expenditures, there have been repeated calls to modernize U.S. criminal justice data infrastructure. This presentation will discuss some exciting opportunities for conducting research at the U.S. Census Bureau on the criminal justice system and its interactions with the family life, education, employment, earnings, and health of the U.S. population. The Census Bureau is currently developing two data infrastructure systems that will be available for external researchers to use, either collaboratively or independently. First, the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), a joint project of the University of Michigan and the Census Bureau, is a growing repository of harmonized longitudinal records from justice agencies integrated into a research platform available to researchers through the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network. These data can be linked at the person-level to study the scope of criminal justice involvement (using the Social Security Agency's Numident file or Decennial Census data to identify population denominators), the labor market impacts of that involvement (using unemployment insurance or tax records of earnings), and outcomes from many other non-criminal justice domains (including program participation using federal administrative data, education outcomes from the American Community Survey, and mortality from Social Security records). Second, the Census Bureau is developing longitudinal infrastructure to measure the employment and earnings of criminal justice personnel. These data can be used to examine the hiring and retention policies of agencies, the human capital of personnel, how these variables interact with agency resources and policies, and their impacts on socioeconomic outcomes of individuals in agency caseloads. To demonstrate the types of applications available to researchers, this presentation will include new research from the CJARS project on the scope and impact of the criminal justice system.

About the Speaker

Keith Finlay is a labor economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he uses administrative records to increase the quality of federal statistical products. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Irvine. He previously held an appointment as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Tulane University. He has published research on the economics of crime, family structure, and illegal drug use.

This event is Co-Sponsored by MPRC and CCJS

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