Designed to harmonize criminal justice offense codes. If you are working with a dataset that contains thousands of rows of cases, each with its own unique charge description associated with it, TOC is a game changer.
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 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.
TOC is now publicly available for external users. For more information about using the tool, please review the instructions. To learn more about the development and methodology behind TOC, please see the working paper. For any questions, concerns, or inquiries, please reach out directly to the TOC development team (cjars-toc@umich.edu).