This repository contains the final dataset used for The Marshall Project and Associated Press story: Prison Populations Drop by 100,000 During Pandemic, published on July 16, 2020.
The ReadMe describes our methodology in collecting these numbers. The final dataset also contains a column explaining how we obtained numbers and what they represent for each state that is included in the final story.
The final data contains numbers for 48 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Alaska and Maryland were excluded from the dataset because we were unable to obtain updated and reliable numbers for these states.
The Marshall Project and Associated Press have been tracking the outbreak of COVID-19 in state and federal prisons since March 2020. This includes tracking positive cases, deaths, numbers of tests, and monthly population numbers. Those monthly population numbers were either found on the websites for each Department of Corrections or reported directly by the department upon request.
Every effort has been made to ensure that these population numbers reflect the population under the custody of state and federal prisons, for which they have been tracking COVID-19 testing information. This means for some states, the numbers reflect all those sentenced by a given state and housed in state-run facilities, privately-run facilities, work release centers, halfway houses, or contracted to be housed out-of-state, in county jails, and so on. In other states, the numbers may only reflect those housed in state-run facilities, if that is the population for which COVID-19 testing information has been made available.
In all cases, this means we have excluded those not in custody of a state or federal prison, such as those on electronic detention, temporarily furloughed, held in county jail back up, or on house arrest/home confinement.
The exceptions to the above are for Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Vermont and Hawaii. These states operated unified jail and prison systems, where facilities hold both sentenced individuals as well as those awaiting trial. To make the numbers more comparable with other states, we have included population counts only for sentenced individuals in these states. Additionally, West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation operates jails, prisons and work release centers, but only individuals in prisons and work release centers have been included for this story.
The population numbers were then vetted to ensure that between March and June, the same population (or subset of the state- of federal-sentenced population) is included. We also tried to ensure that the numbers were from as close to the middle of March and middle of June as possible, but in some cases have included numbers from the beginning or end of the month.
In stories attribute this data to: “According to an analysis of state and federal prison population by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom dedicated to the U.S. criminal justice system, and The Associated Press”
Many reporters and editors at The Marshall Project and The Associated Press contributed to this data, including: Katie Park, Tom Meagher, Weihua Li, Gabe Isman, Cary Aspinwall, Keri Blakinger, Jake Bleiberg, Andrew R. Calderón, Maurice Chammah, Andrew DeMillo, Eli Hager, Jamiles Lartey, Claudia Lauer, Nicole Lewis, Humera Lodhi, Colleen Long, Joseph Neff, Alysia Santo, Beth Schwartzapfel, Damini Sharma, Colleen Slevin, Christie Thompson, Abbie VanSickle, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Adria Watson.
If you have questions about the data, please email us at dsharma@themarshallproject.org or wli@themarshallproject.org.