Information about exposure to the criminal justice system among participants of the PSID Transition into Adulthood Supplement is available under restricted use contract. TAS includes information describing three types of exposure to the criminal justice system among study participants: arrests, probation, and incarceration. For each type of exposure, respondents were asked if they had ever been arrested, ever been on probation for an offense, or ever served time in jail for an offense. All of the information associated with these responses is publicly available through the PSID Online Data Center with the exception of coded responses to the open-ended question about the reason for arrest, probation, or incarceration. In particular, publicly available information includes whether the respondent had ever been arrested, on probation, or incarcerated; whether this occurred once or more than once, and the age when they were arrested, on probation, or incarcerated for the first and, if appropriate, the last time.   Data available under restricted use contract is a detailed coded set of variables describing the reason for arrest, probation, or incarceration. These coded categories were constructed by study staff from open-ended responses that were provided by respondents. Because these outcomes represent sensitive information that could be harmful to respondents’ reputations if they were disclosed, this detailed coded set of variables is classified as restricted data.

To see the specific variables available for each year, please see the Codebook.