The Nebraska Center for Justice Research (NCJR) was established in 2014 with a mission to develop and sustain research capacity internal to the State of Nebraska. Our goal is to assist the Legislature in research, evaluation, and policymaking to reduce recidivism, promote the use of evidence-based practices, and improve public safety. Now it its third year of production, the primary purpose of the Adult Justice report is to provide an overview of recent data concerning Nebraska’s adult criminal justice system.

Most of the data in this report is presented statewide as well as separated into Nebraska’s twelve judicial districts. We also added interstate comparisons to this year’s report so that our readers could compare Nebraska to other states. Nebraska’s two most metropolitan counties are represented by District 4 (Douglas County) and District 3 (Lancaster County). The classification of the remainder of the state’s 93 counties can be found in the table on page 4. Please contact NCJR for any questions regarding county-level estimates of the data included in this report.

Generally, this report compares criminal justice data across Nebraska from 2012 to 2016. Although more recent data was available for some aspects of the criminal justice system, the most complete and comprehensive system-wide data was available for 2015, which we report here to maintain consistency and reliability.