NYU Public Safety Lab’s Jail Data Initiative Steps Up: Incarceration and COVID-19
NYU’s Public Safety Lab uses data collected through its Jail Data Initiative to help advocacy groups and researchers in tracking changing jail populations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
NYU’s Public Safety Lab uses data science and social science to improve public safety outcomes in our communities. Directed by NYU Professor of Politics and Affiliated Professor of Data Science and Law Anna Harvey, the Public Safety Lab works with communities and researchers to design and test strategies to increase equity and efficiency in criminal legal outcomes.
Part of the Lab’s focus is on incarceration in local jails. The Jail Data Initiative’s data science team, supported by funding from Arnold Ventures and the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, is scraping daily county jail rosters and case records in over 1,000 counties across the United States to build a database of daily individual-level incarceration records. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the Jail Data Initiative has received a number of requests to share data on daily jail populations (the number of people in custody in a given facility on any given day). These data allow advocacy groups and researchers to track the response of jail populations to announced policy changes, like whether facilities in counties that have announced the release of people held for low-level nonviolent offenses are in fact showing corresponding declines in daily populations. The Jail Data Initiative has been reporting and providing public access to daily population totals for all the facilities from which the project is collecting daily data; these public access data were recently cited by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner in a call for greater reductions in Pennsylvania jail populations. The Jail Data Initiative has also been sharing the underlying individual-level data with organizations that include The Marshall Project, the Prison Policy Initiative, and The Bail Project.
The Jail Data Initiative is headed by the Public Safety Lab’s Lead Data Scientist and CDS MS student Orion Taylor. CDS students Adrian Pearl and Andrea Wang (’19) are also actively involved in the project. The data are being compiled into a GitHub repository, and will be made available to researchers for other analytical questions related to incarceration.
By Mary Oliver
