New York Criminal Legal System Data Hub

New York Criminal Legal System Data Hub

Important decisions about New York State’s criminal legal system must be driven by data, not political rhetoric. To that end, this data hub centralizes and organizes key indicators relating to arrests, bail, pretrial release, jails, prisons, and parole and presents them with other data points of interest to policymakers, media, advocates, and the public. The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) retrieved the majority of this data from publicly available state agency websites, where it is often available only in raw and difficult to use formats.

Arrests

Most arrests are for minor offenses. In New York City and counties across the state, the vast majority of arrests are for misdemeanor and non-violent felony offenses.

Statewide arrests, by charge type

Arrest rates and charge profiles vary by county. Although counties with larger populations have larger arrest totals, the highest per-capita rates of arrest are in smaller counties.

County arrests, by charge type

Additional data

About the data

The Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) compiles a dataset on arrests from information transmitted by law enforcement agencies to the DCJS Computerized Criminal History database for fingerprintable offenses. Arrests in this dataset involve people who were 18 or older when the crime was allegedly committed. Fingerprintable offenses (defined in Criminal Procedure Law §160.10) include all felonies, misdemeanors defined in the penal law, and misdemeanors defined outside the penal law which would constitute a felony if such a person had a previous judgment of conviction for a crime. This dataset includes the felony charge types violent felony, drug, DWI, and other. Vera created the charge type “non-violent felony” by grouping the categories drug, DWI, and other.

This data hub uses county population data obtained from Vera's Incarceration Trends Project (ITP). Rates are computed per 100,000 residents ages 15 to 64. The population data used in ITP comes from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Bridged-Race Population Estimates. Population data for 2020 was used to compute rates for the period since 2020.


Credits

Design and development: Jill Hubley
Data analysis: Emma Delaporte, Christopher Gernon, Jaeok Kim, Selina Ho, and Sara Lanclos

Charts: Selina Ho, Sara Lanclos, Jill Hubley, and Christian Henrichson

Writing: Brian King, Jaeok Kim, and Christian Henrichson
Editing: Léon Digard

The photograph by Jack Norton originally appeared in No One is Watching: Jail in Upstate New York.