Jail Data Initiative(JDI)
The problem of overincarceration has received considerable attention of late. The focus of this attention, however, has largely been on state and federal prison systems. Often overlooked are local jails. In any given year, county jails will see approximately 11 million new admissions, often because defendants lack the funds to post bail, or even because they lack the funds to pay their fines. Yet we know little about county jail practices, including which counties are systematically jailing defendants pre-trial and/or post-fine, and about the consequences of these practices.
It is possible that longer periods of pre-trial detention, or detainees’ delayed access to counsel, actually increase recidivism, and/or escalate petty offending into more serious offending. Through the generous support of Arnold Ventures and NYU's Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, our data science team is building the architecture to collect and merge daily county jail rosters and criminal case records in more than 1,000 counties. Using these data we will be able both to identify counties that are systematically jailing defendants pre-trial and/or post-fine, and to estimate the impacts of these practices on recidivism.
- We are making available daily jail population counts for every facility in the United States from which we are currently receiving daily roster data. We will update these counts as new roster data are collected.
- Roster URLs are manually verified to ensure that they are reporting official jail roster data in the public record.
- We are sharing these data with the Vera Institute of Justice to support their work on jail populations.
Please contact Public Safety Lab Director Anna Harvey or Lead Data Scientist Orion Taylor (WHO WE ARE) with questions, comments and feedback.