The delaware statistical analysis center (SAC) requests funds to continue efforts to access criminal justice data for research purposes

While the SAC has access to all the criminal justice data available in delaware per code, programmatically accessing and triangulating the data to ease mining constraints and manual lookup has become more difficult as the questions asked of the system become more complex. The answers to the questions require complex databases with large amounts of variables along with more complex analyses. These data mining limitations present substantial time and resource barriers to incorporating the use of data in research and policy analysis beyond state law requiring an annual recidivism study of released prisoners. The SAC seeks funds to assist in discovering new ways to collect and analyze available data with different software, and/or programming efforts. In addition, the SAC is exploring ways to create sustainable databases of triangulated criminal justice data. The SAC is also looking for ways to improve data dissemination on its own website. The SAC would like to include some interactive graphics and/or data analysis tools the public can use to retrieve visual information from the various reports the SAC compiles each year (i.e., crime in delaware, recidivism in delaware). This capability is not available currently.