Jail Data Initiative

*A reminder that in the meantime, you can explore our existing dataset of approximately 11.5 million jail bookings from 2020 to present at jaildatainitiative.org

We hope that migrating to this new framework and providing an easier site experience will facilitate the work of researchers, advocates and policymakers using our jail bookings data 🔼

@publicsafetylab @jaildatainit In locales that report charge descriptions, we'll offer two breakdowns using the @UM_CJARS text-based offense classification model, including an interactive chart (based on @PrisonPolicy's "Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie").

@publicsafetylab @jaildatainit We'll also be expanding the scope of public information available for analysis via our profile pages, with aggregates and daily trends available for viewing and download.

@publicsafetylab @jaildatainit We'll be increasing our default scrape frequency to hourly, and collecting historical data where available. Places like DeKalb County, GA (pictured) for example, *with 1.4 million bookings over 45 years*, mean that our bookings dataset will increase substantially in volume.

🔽 A sneak peek facility profile from the @publicsafetylab @jaildatainit's beta site, highlighting some changes we hope to make to our web scraping and data architecture beta.jaildatainitiative.org/profiles/10000…

On Sep 5 the US jail population reached its highest level since we began collecting data in Jan 2020. For a sample of 509 jails the daily pop hit 128,323—if we extrapolate using total detention capacity, we can estimate that approx 740,000 people were in jail. @publicsafetylab