Sunlight launches Hall of Justice, a massive data inventory on criminal justice across the U.S. by Josh Stewart.
From the post:
Today, Sunlight is launching Hall of Justice, a robust, searchable data inventory of nearly 10,000 datasets and research documents from across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government. Hall of Justice is the culmination of 18 months of work gathering data and refining technology.
The process was no easy task: Building Hall of Justice required manual entry of publicly available data sources from a multitude of locations across the country.
Sunlight’s team went from state to state, meeting and calling local officials to inquire about and find data related to criminal justice. Some states like California have created a data portal dedicated to making criminal justice data easily accessible to the public; others had their data buried within hard to find websites. We also found data collected by state departments of justice, police forces, court systems, universities and everything in between.
“Data is shaping the future of how we address some of our most pressing problems,” said John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. “This new resource is an experiment in how a robust snapshot of data can inform policy and research decisions.”
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In addition to being a great data collection, the Hall of Justice attempts to deliver topic map like capability for searches:
The resource attempts to consolidate different terminology across multiple states, which is far from uniform or standardized. For example, if you search solitary confinement you will return results for data around solitary confinement, but also for the terms “segregated housing unit,” “SHU,” “administrative segregation” and “restrictive housing.” This smart search functionality makes finding datasets much easier and accessible.
Looking at all thirteen results for a search on “solitary confinement,” I don’t see the mapping in question. Or certainly no mapping based on characteristics of the subject, “solitary confinement.”
As close as Georgia’s 2013 Juvenile Justice Reform is using the word “restrictive” as in:
Create a two-class system within the Designated Felony Act. Designated felony offenses are divided into two classes, based on severity—Class A and Class B—that continue to allow restrictive custody while also adjusting available sanctions to account for both offense severity and risk level.
Restrictive custody is what jail systems are about so that doesn’t trip the wire for “solitary confinement.”
Of course, the links are to entire reports/documents/data sets so each researcher will have to extract and collate content individually. When that happens, a means to contribute that collation/mapping to the Hall of Justice would be a boon for other researchers. (Can you say “topic map?”)
As I write this, you will need to prefer Mozilla over Chrome, at least on Ubuntu.
Trigger Warning: If you are sensitive to traumatic events and/or reports of traumatic events, you may want to ask someone less sensitive to review these data sources.
The only difference between a concentration camp and American prisons is the lack of mass gas chambers. Every horror and abuse that you can imagine and some you probably can’t, are visited on people in U.S. prisons everyday.
As Joan Baez says in Prison Triology:
Sunlight’s Hall of Justice is a great step forward in documenting the chambers of horror we call American prisons.
And we’re gonna raze, raze the prisons
To the ground
Help us raze, raze the prisons
To the ground
Are you ready?