I work with state, regional, and local leaders on criminal justice reform and we currently have a number of major projects in the area of bail reform. Getting data and getting good data are constant problems in criminal justice projects. There are a myriad of systems, they don’t speak to each other, and little reporting is produced for local users to assess how they are doing. With COVID and the BLM protests, we’ve been inundated with requests to help jurisdictions reduce jail populations and to address racial disparities in incarceration. One hurdle is that while each county jail has an electronic jail management system, there is no easy way for stakeholders to understand that data or report to local leaders and community members on local jail populations. I’m interested to develop an open source program that local stakeholders can use to upload their data and see key metrics, such as: who is in jail and why (e.g., pretrial hold; serving a sentence; hold for ICE); for pretrial detainees, what type of crime are they charged with (e.g., felony; misdemeanor; traffic offense); how long have they been held (e.g., < three days; > 1 year; etc.); type of hold (e.g., secured bond; release not authorized; fugitive hold; impaired driving hold); percentage of people with repeat bookings; etc. I’d also like them to see these metrics by race and gender, and to see changes over time (e.g., are pretrial detentions decreasing year over year; did those detentions change before and after a time certain when a reform was instituted).
I’d also like users to be able to link to underlying booking records e.g., to look at all bookings were the defendant has been incarcerated pretrial for over a year (so those defendants can be put on a court docket to review the status of their cases). I’m not giving you all of the metrics at issue—just enough to give you an idea of the project. Although the jails use different jail management systems, 2 or 3 predominate; if the program could be compatible with more than one jail management system, that would be great. We have a lot of experience working with jail records. On my end, I’d work with the jails to create a codebook for data entry, ensuring uniformity. FYI wealthier communities have county IT departments that can help with this, but most NC counties are poor and rural and they don’t have those resources, especially now.
There will be a very visible presence for this project including many opportunities for students to present the resource to judicial, law enforcement and local leaders.