TOC

Text-based Offense Classification (TOC) is a result of a collaboration between Measures for Justice (MFJ) and the University of Michigan’s Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) program, each using court records to assess the performance and impact of criminal case processes. We used hundreds of thousands of hand-coded records produced by MFJ and the machine learning expertise of the CJARS team, following an offense scheme adapted by the team from prior work of the NCRP and others. Together, we designed a uniform crime classification standard (UCCS) schema and an accompanying machine learning algorithm to predict the appropriate standard charge classification. TOC will make the painstaking task of hand-coding offense descriptions obsolete and usher in a new era of leveraging machine-learning assisted techniques.