Related Guides
Selected Data & Statistical Sources
For additional sources of crime data and statistics, see the Criminal Justice Data & Statistics research guide.
- Adults in Correctional Facilities from Decennial Census, 2000-2020 (The Marshall Project) Downloadable dataset of the number of adults in correctional facilities per county from the 2000, 2010 and 2020 Decennial Census.
- United States Sentencing Commission, Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics The tables and figures available on the ISB are based on the tables and figures available in the Commission's printed Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics (Sourcebook). The Sourcebook displays federal sentencing data from the Commission's datafiles. As part of its ongoing mission, the Commission provides Congress, the Judiciary, the Executive branch, and the general public with data extracted and analyzed from sentencing documents submitted by courts to the Commission.
- Crime in the United States An annual publication for more than eight decades, the Crime in the United States report contains a compilation of the volume and rate of violent and property crime offenses for the nation and by state using Summary Reporting System data and summarized data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
- Bureau of Justice Statistics The mission of BJS is to collect, analyze, publish, and disseminate information on crime, criminal offenders, victims of crime, and the operation of justice systems at all levels of government.
- Court Statistics Project The Court Statistics Project (CSP) — a joint project of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) — publishes caseload data from the courts of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. These data are provided by the offices of the state court administrator in those jurisdictions. The data reported here conform to the definitions and case counting rules in the State Court Guide to Statistical Reporting (Guide). States publish their own data that may be more extensive, although not directly comparable to other states for a variety of reasons, including differences in court structure, case definitions and counting practices, court rules, statutes, or terminology.
- National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) archives and disseminates data on crime and justice for secondary analysis. The archive contains data from over 2,700 curated studies or statistical data series. NACJD is home to several large-scale and well known datasets, including the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and the Project on Human Development in Chicago
- Federal Bureau of Prisons Maintains statistics on inmates, population, and staff.
- Sunlight Foundation Hall of Justice Hall of Justice is a Sunlight Foundation Project working with criminal justice data. The project is no longer maintained, but you can find the archived underlying data set here.
- The National Registry of Exonerations The Registry collects, analyzes and disseminates information about all known exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in the United States, from 1989 to the present. We publish their stories and we provide accessible, searchable online statistical data about their cases. We also conduct empirical studies of the process of exoneration and of factors that lead to the underlying wrongful convictions.
- Longitudinal Dataset of Private Prisons (Anna Gunderson) Variables in this dataset include: Political Scientist Anna Gunderson's original data on the location and capacity of private prisons in the United States from 1986 to 2016, proportion of inmates held in private facilities (post 1999), the year each state privatized, an original measure of the approximate number of corrections officers that are unionized in each state, among other demographic, political, and social variables. Some of these variables are available from 1984
- National COVID-19 Statistics (The COVID Prison Project) The site will offer analysis and resources to better understand how coronavirus is impacting people who are incarcerated. We track data from all 50 US states, Puerto Rico, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Content will focus on data collection and analysis using a public health-oriented framework.
- World Prison Brief: International Imprisonments Highest to Lowest World Prison Brief is an online database providing free access to information on prison systems around the world. It is hosted by the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London.
Criminal Justice Data: Boston
- The Woke Windows Project: A Comprehensive Database on the Boston Police The goal of the Woke Windows Project is to bring transparency to the activities of law enforcement in our community.We collect data from public sources. We combine these data to form inter-linked reports and tables that give every individual the ability to understand policing in their community. Our focus at this time is on The Boston Police Department, because the activities of our local police have the greatest immediate impact on our lives.
- Data from Social Media Monitoring by Boston Police (Data for Justice Project, ACLU Massachusetts) Spreadsheet of emails from 2014 to 2016 about social media surveillance by the Boston Police Department’s Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), including metadata (times, senders, recipients), subject, and text.
- Analyze Boston: Public Safety Datasets Crime Incident Reports, Fire Incident Reporting, BPD Field Interrogation and Observation, BPD Firearm Recovery Counts and legacy Crime Incidence Reports and 911 Daily Dispatch Count by Agency
- Massachusetts Hate Crime Data (Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security) Searchable by community, college, state police unit, hospital. The data in this theme is a combination of NIBRS and combined Summary totals, and reflects data from agencies who have successfully submitted crime data for the selected year.
- Massachusetts Crime Statistics Find DUI/Drugs, Violent Crime, Hate Crime and All Arrestee, for Boston, Suffolk State Police, colleges, universities, Mass General Hospital, MBTA (by county)
- Massachusetts Detailed Arrest Records Searchable by community, college, state police unit, hospital
- Police Arrest Data for Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Data for Justice Project, ACLU Massachusetts) Spreadsheet of “low-level” arrests made in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 2012 to 2017. Includes county, arresting agency, date of arrest, offense, arrestee age (except for Suffolk County), arrestee gender (except for Suffolk County), and arrestee race.
- Massachusetts Department of Corrections: Data Dashboards Interactive dashboards that provide visual data and interactive tools that allow the public to view inmate and prison data and statistics through visual charts and graphs. Includes January 1 Snapshots, Admissions, Releases, Releases to Community, Inmate Profiles and more DOC dashboards. Searchable by DOC unit or county.
- Department of Defense 1033 Program (Data for Justice Project, ACLU Massachusetts) Spreadsheet of purchases of military weapons by local law enforcement departments from 1994 to 2017. Includes item name, quanitity, cost, and shipping date for police departments in 50 U.S. States and 4 U.S. Territories (District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands). While Boston Police Department does not appear on the list, federal law enforcement entities located in Boston, do.
- Prosecution Data from the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office) Data for Justice Project, ACLU Massachusetts) Spreadsheets of every charge processed to a disposition by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in 2013 and 2014, including dates, docket number, court, defendant race, charge, and disposition.
- Police Scorecard The Police Scorecard is the first nationwide public evaluation of policing in the United States. The Scorecard calculates levels of police violence, accountability, racial bias and other policing outcomes for over 16,000 municipal and county law enforcement agencies, covering nearly 100% of the US population. The
- Stanford Open Policing Project (Stanford Computational Policy Lab) Standardized stop data are available to download (by location). Data from the Massachusetts State Police include: Stop Date, Stop Location, Driver Race, Driver Sex, Driver Age, Search Conducted, Contraband Found, Citation Issued, Warning Issues, Arrest Made.
- Gun Violence Archive The Gun Violence Archive is an online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near-real time data about the results of gun violence. GVA is an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization. Search is for Boston.
- FBI Crime Data Explorer Select Massachusetts. Crime data for Massachusetts are derived from both incident-based (NIBRS) and summary (SRS) reports voluntarily submitted to the FBI. Includes Boston, UMass Boston, and Boston University police departments
Public Opinion
- Roper Center Public Opinion Archives This link opens in a new window The Roper Center is a public opinion archive that preserves the data from polls conducted by many leading survey organizations. Most of the data are from the United States, but over 50 nations are represented. The iPOLL databank offers access to nearly half a million survey questions and answers asked in the U.S. by more than 150 survey organizations. Direct links are given to study documentation and datasets. Date coverage: 1930s – present.
- Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. We conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. We do not take policy positions.
- The Roper Center: Black Lives Matter As we reflect on racism and anti-racism, the Roper Center has identified and is making available all public opinion surveys of Black Americans in the Roper data archive. We highlight these surveys of Black Americans, which span from 1945 to 2020, in order to remember and amplify the voices of these individuals. We are also making more than eight decades of public opinion data on how the U.S. public views Black America available. These data provide historical insight into how racial attitudes have changed in the United States and how the public currently views topics such as police brutality, race relations, and Black Lives Matter.
