These pages use the U.S. Sentencing Commission Individual Offender files. The current working year is fiscal year 2025, which runs from October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025. The source file name is opafy25nid.csv. The Commission publishes that file. This site does not republish the rows.
What the file is
It is the near-complete set of defendants sentenced in United States federal courts for that fiscal year. It is not a sample. It is not state-court data. Most violent crime is prosecuted in state court and is not in this file.
The figures are observational. They are not adjusted for every legally relevant sentencing factor. An association in a table is not a cause.
How prison length is counted
Prison length is SENTTCAP, and only for defendants who received a prison sentence (PRISDUM = 1). It is not TOTPRISN. It is not a raw average of SENTTOT.
A life sentence is SENTTCAP = 470. Those cases are left out of medians and means and counted on their own. A non-life sentence at the cap is stored as 469.99 months, not as life.
Small cells
Some state-and-offense cells have fewer than five cases. In the current widget, the median and the mean for those cells are blank. That blank is a statistical threshold, not a privacy hold. The counts and percentages in those cells are shown. They are not zeroed. If a later change fills a median because the figure is more accurate, the page will say what threshold remains.
A count is not a person. This site does not publish a row, a name, or the free-text reason a judge wrote.
What a comparison is not
Status points (SENTPTS) changed meaning at guideline year 2023, under Amendment 821. A table that pools status points across that year is not a before-and-after comparison.
Judge-initiated sentences below the range are not the same thing as government-sponsored departures, including substantial assistance under ยง5K1.1.
ZEROPNT, the zero-point offender adjustment, exists from fiscal year 2024 on. It is not shown for earlier years.
Source
Data source: U.S. Sentencing Commission, FY2025 Individual Offender Data (opafy25nid.csv). Imprisonment statistics are federal courts only and use SENTTCAP. Life sentences (470 months) are excluded from medians and means and reported separately. Figures are observational and unadjusted for legally relevant sentencing factors.