National Pretrial Reporting Program

The Bureau of Justice Statistics is seeking applications to design and test strategies to field the National Pretrial Reporting Program (NPRP). NPRP will replace the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) program as BJS’s primary data collection series focused on the pretrial release process in state courts. Historically, SCPS compiled case-level information on pretrial release and misconduct, as well as other components of criminal case processing, on a sample of defendants charged with a felony during the month of May in the nation’s 75 most populous counties. It excluded non-felony defendants, cases filed during other parts of the calendar year, and jurisdictions outside the nation’s 75 most populous counties. The SCPS surveys were conducted every 2 years from 1988 through 2006. Expanding beyond SCPS’s focus on the 75 largest counties, the goal of the new NPRP is to generate national estimates on pretrial release and misconduct in state courts. The successful applicant will engage in a design and development effort that allows for the generation of key measures of interest in the pretrial area from a nationally representative sample of state trial courts. The successful applicant will also develop an implementation plan to conduct the first wave of data collection in this new statistical series. BJS anticipates making one award for a 20-month period under this solicitation.