At the Criminal Justice Innovation Lab, we’re focused on an evidence-based approach to criminal justice issues. We deal with a lot of data and try to make that information relevant and accessible to state and local leaders. Case in point, our new North Carolina Record Clearance Dashboard. On the Dashboard, you can choose various policy options, including:
- Offenses to include in the policy—for example, do you want to include administrative traffic misdemeanors? Other non-violent misdemeanors?
- Charges that did or didn’t result in a conviction
- Service date for included offenses
- Relevant policy exclusions—for example, do you want to exclude from your policy option people who have a pending charge or conviction for a violent offense? For an impaired driving offense?
Once you pick your policy options, the Dashboard gives you results—the number of working-age people impacted, including by race and ethnicity. You can change your policy options and see more results.
On Dashboard’s Methodology section, we fully explain our data source, methodology, and more. Here are some highlights:
- The data powering the Dashboard are actual records from the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts Automated Criminal/Infraction System (ACIS).
- ACIS doesn’t include a field or identifier that connects individuals to all of their cases in the system. We developed a matching process to do that, to avoid double counting people.
- The numbers reported on the Dashboard are an undercount for two reasons. First, we only have ACIS data going back to 2014. Second, while we have ACIS records through December 31, 2023, we don’t yet have records from the court system’s new Odyssey records management system (but we’re working on that!).
We’re already collecting ideas for version 2.0 of the Record Clearance Dashboard. For example, we’d love to provide results at the county level. If you have suggestions, let us know, using the web form here.
The Dashboard was a team effort. Aside from me, primary contributors included Alexander Cowell, Lab Research Director; Ethan Rex, Lab Data Manager; Will Taylor, Lab Data Analyst; and Jamie Vaske, a Professor at Western Carolina University.
Want more data about the North Carolina criminal justice system? Check out our Measuring Justice Dashboard—we just updated it with ACIS data through the end of 2023—and the many briefing papers and report on our website.