Data were collected from official court records, with the unit of analysis being the criminal act charged. An account of study methodology also describes how multiple charges were handled in the data collection. The variables were year of the criminal charge; the first, second, and third offenses charged; bail amount; length of prison term; and the sex, age, and race of the defendant. The description of the six files in the data set covers the logical record length and the kinds of control cards used. The codebook contains the code number and matching description for each variable, including sentence and offenses.