Survey of Prison Inmates Statistical Support Center (SPISSC)

The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) Survey of Prison Inmates (SPI), formerly known as the Surveys of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, is used to collect and analyze data from state and federal prisoners, and to produce national statistics on the U.S. prison population. BJS seeks an agent to implement the Survey of Prison Inmates Statistical Support Center (SPISSC) project. The SPISSC is designed to provide scientific and technical support for statistical and methodological research, statistical analyses, data linkage, documentation, and dissemination services in support of SPI; enhance the utility and relevance of BJS’s statistical reporting program from the SPI and other federal sources of data that complement the SPI; increase the use of the SPI data, including by researchers to focus on key challenges that face the correctional field and strategies for dealing with them, and to provide non-statistical audiences translational products to increase the use of these statistics to the larger community of stakeholders and practitioners. The SPISSC will enhance BJS’s efforts to expand its capacity to analyze SPI data and leverage administrative records to supplement the survey data, document the analyses and expand on the survey documentation, and increase the understanding and use of the SPI data by the broader research and stakeholder communities, thus increasing the breadth of substantive issues that SPI addresses in both the short run and longer term.