BJS FY 24 Census of Jails, 2025 and 2026 | O BJS 2024 172077

Opportunity Information: Apply for O BJS 2024 172077

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is offering a discretionary funding opportunity, issued as a cooperative agreement, to select one organization to serve as the data collection agent for the Census of Jails (COJ) in 2025 and 2026. The core purpose of the award is to support the nationwide administration of the COJ to roughly 2,900 jail jurisdictions, producing consistent, high-quality jail statistics that can be reported at both the county and state levels. The solicitation reflects a major shift in how BJS will run the COJ: after decades of conducting it every 5 to 6 years (from 1970 through 2024) to capture snapshots of jail populations and facility characteristics, BJS plans to move to an annual census beginning in 2025, which will allow for year-over-year measurement of changes in jail operations and populations.

Under this award, the selected recipient will be expected to handle the end-to-end implementation of the 2025 and 2026 COJ collections. That includes developing and maintaining a web-based version of the survey instruments, ensuring the survey is usable and secure for a wide range of jail agencies with varying levels of technical capacity. The recipient must also update jail status and contact information (a critical task because jail administration structures, points of contact, and operational status can change frequently), conduct outreach and data collection, and then process, validate, and deliver the final annual datasets to BJS. In practice, this kind of work typically involves building and maintaining a respondent management system, tracking submissions and follow-up activity, applying data quality checks, resolving inconsistencies with respondents, documenting methods, and packaging the resulting data and metadata so BJS can produce official statistics.

The opportunity is identified as "BJS FY 24 Census of Jails, 2025 and 2026" with Funding Opportunity Number O-BJS-2024-172077. It is associated with the information and statistics activity category and CFDA number 16.734. BJS anticipates making a single award (Expected Awards: 1) with an award ceiling of $1,500,000. The original closing date for applications was June 13, 2024, and the opportunity record lists a creation date of April 12, 2024. Because the instrument is a cooperative agreement, applicants should expect substantial involvement from BJS during the project period, which often means closer collaboration on technical decisions, data standards, schedules, and deliverables than would occur under a more hands-off grant.

Eligibility is broad and includes public and state-controlled institutions of higher education, private institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) status (other than institutions of higher education), for-profit organizations (other than small businesses), small businesses, and Native American tribal organizations (other than federally recognized tribal governments). Finally, while the award as advertised covers the 2025 and 2026 COJ cycles, BJS notes that additional funding may be made available to continue the work for the 2027, 2028, and 2029 COJ collections, but only if future funds are available and the recipient demonstrates strong performance. This structure signals BJS interest in continuity and scalability, since running the COJ annually requires stable systems, reliable field operations, and consistent methods from year to year.

• The Bureau of Justice Statistics in the information and statistics sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "BJS FY 24 Census of Jails, 2025 and 2026" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 16.734.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2024-04-12.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-06-13. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $1,500,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 1 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments), Nonprofits having a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education, For-profit organizations other than small businesses, Small businesses.

Apply for O BJS 2024 172077

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