Survey of American prisons and jails, 1979

The Survey of American Prisons and Jails, 1979, was conducted by the ABT Associates of Cambridge, Massachusetts, under a grant from the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. The survey consists of two parts, a survey of state and federal adult correctional systems and a survey of community based pre-release facilities. The surveys were an attempt to assess more precisely institutional conditions in state and federal prisons and in halfway houses. Questionnaires were mailed to 558 federal and state prisons and 405 community based pre-release facilities. The variables include inmate counts by sex and by security class, age of facility and rated capacity, spatial density, composition of inmate population according to race, age and offense type, inmate labor and earnings, and race, age, and sex characteristics of prison staff. This file was revised in Fall 1983 and now contains more descriptive variable information and revised missing data designations.