This page provides users with access to the Commission's annual individual offender datafiles that support the Commission's research agenda.
The Commission's individual offender datafiles exclude individual identifiers and provide fiscal year data for researchers interested in studying federal sentencing practices through quantitative methods. These datafiles do not contain information from the Commission's Organizational, Resentencing, or Appeals Databases. The Commission's individual datafiles may also be accessed through the University of Michigan's Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
The complexity of the federal sentencing guidelines, and by extension, federal sentencing data can lead researchers to make errors when using this data. Guidance on how to avoid common pitfalls can be found in the Office of Research and Data's presentation, "Effective Use of Federal Sentencing Data."