LibGuides: URBS 3546: Carceral Geographies (Urban Studies Junior Seminar): Data and Statistics

Suggested resources on incarceration and domestic violence

See the general Urban Studies research guide for many more sources of quantitative sources.

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence - Statistics & Fact Sheets
Fact sheets and statistics available at the national, state, and community/population levels
Incarcerated Women and Girls: Fact Sheet
From the Sentencing Project: "Research on female incarceration is critical to understanding the full consequences of mass incarceration and to unraveling the policies and practices that lead to their criminalization. The female incarcerated population stands over six times higher than in 1980."
The Sentencing Project Data
The Sentencing Project is a nonprofit that advocates for changes in sentencing and alternatives to incarceration. Data from the Sentencing Project includes helpful maps and state-by-state data gathered from many of the sources listed in this section. The Sentencing Project also publishes reports and has a list of state contact organizations which may publish their own reports.
Vera Institute of Justice - Incarceration Trends
Vera’s data visualization tool, Incarceration Trends, provides trend data on the number of people in jails and prisons for every county and state in the U.S. The data sources include BJS jail statistics as well as state level county prison reports, which are linked.
National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD)
The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) at the University of Michigan archives, curates, and makes available datasets related to crime and justice for secondary analysis. This includes long-term data series such as those published annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics as well as data from curated studies.

Bureau of Justice Statistics

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is a federal agency under the Department of Justice; that collects and creates creates data, surveys, and reports about inmate populations, prisons, expenditures, deaths in custody, policing, victims of crime, and more. The BJS site is somewhat confusing. Specific series and data sets of interest for studying trends in populations of incarcerated people, policing, and crime over time include:

the Prisoners series for prison populations
the Annual Survey of Jails and Census of Jails for local jail populations
the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS); see also Arrest Data Analysis Tool (tables and figures of arrest data from 1980 onward, with national arrest estimates, customized either by age and sex or by age group and race; this tool is produced from underlying data from this NCVS)
the Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS) - detailed information on the characteristics of a nationally representative sample of persons who had some type of contact with police during the year, including those who contacted the police to report a crime or were pulled over in a traffic stop

The Key Statistics page provides easy access to national trend data. You can also search over available data table files and other files. The BJS is the source of much of the data that is used in reports and visualizations from other sources mentioned in our library research guides.

Alternatives to U.S. federal data

"Recently, there have been significant changes to the availability of federal data. These data are heavily used by researchers and the general public; they also undergird policy and funding decisions made on behalf of people across the US and worldwide." - NYU Libraries

Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition
A thorough guide from University of Minnesota Libraries, including how to cite missing information
Data Rescue Project
The Data Rescue Project and their Data Rescue Tracker is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. It serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. "We want to know what is happening in the community so that we can coordinate focus."
End of Term Web Archive
The End of Term Web Archive captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The EOT has thus far preserved websites from administration changes in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
ICPSR is one of the largest repositories for social science data in the world. Among the many topics covered, you will find statistics on crime, education, demographics, elections, religion, and much more.

Internet Archive: US Government Documents
This collection contains digital versions of United States Government documents as well as other government documents.

PolicyMap
Online data and mapping tool for creating custom reports of data related to demographics, real estate, health, jobs, the environment, education and more. Data comes from authoritative public and proprietary sources. It has thousands of indicators on demographics, the economy, housing, lending, quality of life, education, health, and more. Data is available at the neighborhood census block group in many cases, up to a national level, depending on the data.

Tracking Removed and Modified Government Information & Resources
This project from academic librarians at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities and University of Illinois, Urbana - Champaign is an attempt to track removed and modified government information and resources, to help the public see the scope of what has been removed or modified, and to point to where preserved copies can be found, if possible. There is a form where anyone can add entries for missing gov information and a publicly viewable spreadsheet of all the entries received.
Wayback Machine
Allows you to search among screen captures of web sites over time, with over 411 billion web pages saved. Start with a known URL to explore past iterations of a website and its content.

URBS 3546: Carceral Geographies (Urban Studies Junior Seminar)

Credits

More data and statistics

Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC)

Jennie Correia, Social Sciences Librarian

Martha Tenney

Suggested resources on incarceration and domestic violence

Bureau of Justice Statistics

Alternatives to U.S. federal data