Total Environmental Scan

The WRNA was originally created through a cooperative agreement between the National Institute of Corrections and the University of Cincinnati through research conducted by Patricia Van Voorhis, Emily Salisbury, Emily Wright, and Ashley Bauman. The instrument is now managed by Dr. Emily Salisbury at Utah Criminal Justice Center (UCJC), College of Social Work University of Utah.
The WRNA is a public-domain instrument. However, there are conditions of use, a license agreement, and training costs associated with its implemenation.
This webpage from Utah Criminal Justice Center (UCJC), College of Social Work University of Utah has links to research articles written about the WRNA over the last 13 years.

The U.S. economy has been on a long, slow upward trend for eight years, but a Cornell economist predicts that – like all good things – the steady growth will soon come to an end, likely by the end of the year.

It won’t be a disastrous scenario like the 2009 recession, but rather a garden-variety reaction to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates and, in turn, interest-sensitive sectors cooling off, he said.

The U.S. leads the global landscape in technology innovation. The country’s competitive edge, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Competitive Index, is due to its business dynamism, strong institutional pillars, financing mechanisms, and vibrant innovation ecosystem.[1] Innovation is a trademark feature of American competitiveness and has powered its global dominance since the post-World-War industrial revolution. Countries that lead the world in generating advanced technologies and leveraging the full productive capacity of their digital economies can gain a strategic competitive advantage.

Statistics on revenue, expenditure, debt, and assets (cash and security holdings) for US governments. There are statistics for the 50 state areas and the District of Columbia, as well as a national summary.

Please read the accompanying documentation for the individual unit file before using these data. It can be found in the .zip file below.          

This report examines the civil rights of women in United States prisons. The population of women in prison has increased dramatically since the 1980s, and this growth has outpaced that of men in prison, yet there have been few national-level studies of the civil rights issues incarcerated women experience.The Commission studied a range of issues that impact incarcerated women, includingdeprivations of women’s medical needs that may violate the constitutional requirement to provide adequate medical care for all prisoners; implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act(PREA); and the sufficiency of programs to meet women’s needs afterrelease.

This site shows the monthly and quarterly US employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 2019.

On December 21, 2018, President Trump signed into law the First Step Act of 2018 (P.L. 115- 391). The act was the culmination of several years of congressional debate about what Congress might do to reduce the size of the federal prison population while also creating mechanisms to maintain public safety. 

Doubts about the current system of mass incarceration emerge in a nationally representative survey, even in more politically conservative, rural parts of the country. Indeed, in an era of broad speculation about a growing urban-rural divide, there is general consensus between rural America, small cities and major metropolitan areas that the criminal justice system is not working and communities should focus on priorities other than spending millions on prisons and jails.

This report from the Sentencing Project seeks to inform stakeholders in other states of the range of policy options available to them fo significantly reducing their prison population.  It will show how these states employed five key strategies to achieve these reductions and the report provides extensive reviews of the results.

Key Findings

1. The criminal-justice arena faces an abundance of information technology opportunities. However, important barriers, including a lack of business cases; a lack of implementation plans and procedures; and a lack of security, privacy, and civil-rights protections, hinder its ability to take advantage of those opportunities.
2. Agencies need to develop business cases and common processes for implementing new technologies.
3. Research is needed to improve sharing of criminal-justice technology among practitioners and researchers.
   Read the report to learn more.

• The population of 26 countries, nearly all in Africa, will at least double. Niger in West Africa will see its population nearly triple.
• A total of 38 countries will have smaller populations in 2050 than in 2018. China will register the largest numerical population decrease―about 50 million―followed by Japan at 25 million and Russia at 9.4 million. Romania will see the largest percentage decline in population (23 percent).
• The population of the United States will reach 390 million, up from 328 million in 2018.