Collection of offender datasets 1984-2005

Brief description

This collection includes “offender datasets” obtained from various administrative collections within the Western Australian criminal justice system. Offender datasets describe all official offenders and their offending patterns. The entire collection contains 122,517 offenders born between 1977 and 1995 who had had contact with the WA criminal justice system between 1984 and 2005. The collection describes both juvenile and adult offending, and includes matter dealt with via juvenile diversionary schemes.

The data is de-identified and contains a unique identifier, which distinguishes one offender from another. Each offender has a different identifier and every event record for that offender is allocated the same identifier. The aim of the identifier is to link records that are believed to belong to the same person from two or more different datasets. The unique identifier was created through the INOIS system (Ferrante, 1993).

The data for this study was made available through long-standing agreements between a number of government agencies in Western Australia and the Crime Research Centre, University of Western Australia.