The calculation of recidivism - an important measure of the criminal justice system's effectiveness in reducing crime - requires an analysis of criminal history records of offenders processed by State criminal justice systems. Historically, collecting and processing multi-State criminal history records into a common coding structure suitable for statistical analysis has been time-consuming and labor-intensive. In recent years, BJS partnered with Nlets to develop a new, automated data-collection process that reduces the time needed to collect and consolidate individual State and Federal criminal history records into a uniform file layout. In addition, BJS worked with NORC to develop software that converts the State and Federal fields from the criminal history records into a common coding structure that supports national-level criminal history research. BJS's recent data collection of the criminal histories of released prisoners was the first to use the FBI's Interstate Identification Index (III) to directly access the criminal history record systems of all 50 States. The data collection captured the criminal histories of prisoners released in 2005 in 30 States. This was twice the number of States included in the previous BJS recidivism study on prisoners released in 1994. This paper summarizes the findings of this study as well as a second similar study released in September 2015. 1 figure and 4 notes