The Evaluation of Statewide Sentencing Guidelines project studied the development, implementation, and use of statewide sentencing guidelines and reported on the perceptions of criminal justice system personnel and inmates regarding these guidelines. One part of the research consisted of interviewing inmates about their attitudes toward the relative seriousness of offenses, severity of punishment, appropriate penalties for various kinds of crimes, and about their perceptions of sentencing guidelines as a tool to structure judicial sentencing decisions. Two files make up the 1979 New Jersey inmate data: inmate background data and inmate survey data. The background file includes 25 variables containing socioeconomic, residential, and current and prior criminal history information on a random sample of 226 Rahway New Jersey State Prison inmates. Background information was collected for all of the inmates selected to participate in the 1979 New Jersey inmate survey, but not all of those inmates selected agreed to be interviewed when the survey was conducted. The inmate survey data file contains information on 146 inmates. The discussion of methodology covers data scope, file processing, confidentiality procedures, tape and file specifications, the data dictionary listing, the survey instrument, the Statistical Package of Social Sciences access programs, and variable frequency distributions. Both the sets of data come in card-image format, with one and five records per case, respectively.