The challenge of collecting sentencing data

The Cleveland Plain Dealer today has this very interesting article that highlights the challenges that surrounding the collection of sentencing data at the state level.  The article is entitled “Ohio law on tracking race of felons is ignored,” and here is how it begins:

A dozen years ago, judicial leaders troubled that Ohio’s courtrooms were getting an unwanted reputation for treating blacks more harshly than whites for similar crimes turned to state lawmakers for help.  The result was a law urging the Ohio Supreme Court to force lower-court judges to track the race, ethnicity, gender and religion of everyone before their bench convicted of a felony to test whether the perceptions were rooted in reality.

Yet today, not a single digit of the data has been collected. And despite two reports since then from state study groups urging implementation of the law, the matter hasn’t seriously been considered in at least five years.  Meanwhile, that perception problem — it’s just as bad, some jurists say.

Though focused on race issues in particular, the article does an effective job reviewing the array of issues that arise in the effort to collect lots of dynamic sentencing data effectively.