Most drug possession arrests in York County were made for marijuana, but almost 80 percent of overdose patients admitted to York Hospital in 2010 were related to prescription drugs.

While the bulk of all crime was centered on the city that year, rape was geographically more evenly distributed than other violent crimes.

And though the ratio of females to males in the county is nearly even, men outnumber women by nearly 7-to-1 in the prison.

Officials are hoping facts such as these, included in the Criminal Justice Trends Report presented to county commissioners Wednesday, help shape priorities in the county's judicial system. The report offers the first in-depth countywide look at crime, prosecution and treatment, said Felicia Dell, director of the York County Planning Commission.

To guide change: The commission completed the study for the county's Criminal Justice Advisory Board and plans to update it each year, she said.

The board will use the information, the first compilation of data based on a countywide level instead of by jurisdictional divisions, to guide changes on a county level, she said.

The data reinforce some initiatives

the county has taken, but also bring to light other issues that workers in a specific field might not have identified because they lacked a countywide perspective, said Amy Evans, criminal justice planner with the planning commission.

For example, the data show the county was on target when it decided to create a DUI treatment court, established as a pilot in 2010 to provide closely supervised drug and alcohol treatment for offenders instead of taking them to jail.

The data show 20 percent of the cases assigned in the public defender's office and 30 percent of the District Attorney's caseload were related to DUI in 2010, she said.

The information from the report can guide the advisory board as it considers a possible expansion of the treatment, she said.

One nugget of information revealed by the data, she said, is the number of repeat offenders. About 80 percent of repeat arrests were related to a parole or probation violation, the report showed.

Many traffic filings: The study also looked at cases filed on the magisterial level, showing most of the 104,841 filings in 2010 were traffic-related. More than 62,000 were related to traffic offenses, while 8,300 were criminal filings and 5,300 were landlord/tenant issues such as eviction.

In the Court of Common Pleas, 66 percent of the defendants in criminal cases pleaded guilty, and 23 percent were entered into a first-time offenders program and avoided trial. Only 2 percent of cases went to jury trial.

The study's analysis of the next level of the judicial process, corrections, showed that violated parole is the most common reason people are in York County Prison. About a third of prisoners in 2010 violated their parole. Drug offenses, at about 14 percent, were the second most common offense.

The study also compared racial composition of the county and racial composition of the county's prison population.

While the county is 88 percent white, 6 percent black and 6 percent "other," the prison population is 59 percent white, 28 percent black and 13 percent "other," the report showed.

-- Reach Christina Kauffman at 505-5436, ckauffman@yorkdispatch.com, or follow her at @YDYorkCounty.