| Summary: | The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) began designing the National Prisoner Statistics Program - Coronavirus Pandemic Supplement (NPS-CPan) in spring 2020, while simultaneously adding questions on the effects of COVID-19 to its Annual Survey of Jails and Annual Surveys of Probation and Parole. The NPS-CPan was conducted from April to October, 2021 by Abt Associates, Inc. on behalf of BJS, as part of the existing multiyear award to collect annual National Prisoner Statistics (NPS-1b) and National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) data. The NPS-CPan was designed to be fielded a single time, and was administered to the 50 state departments of corrections (DOCs) and the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which is also responsible for housing felons sentenced in the District of Columbia. Respondents were asked to complete a survey requesting details on the monthly custody prison population, admissions, and releases of prisoners from January 2020 to February 2021 and counts and demographic distributions of prisoners who tested positive for and who died from COVID-19. In addition, questions covered policies and practices used by states and the BOP to mitigate transmission of the virus, expedite release of prisoners, and determine the process by which staff and prisoners were vaccinated in early 2021. This 14-month survey period allowed BJS to track monthly trends in admissions and custody populations immediately prior to widespread COVID-19 infections in the United States, as well as capture the introduction of vaccines to prison systems.
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