Why a Jail Overview?
In many jurisdictions, people’s impression of who is in their jail differs from what the data indicate. Even when system stakeholders have an accurate sense of who is in jail, examining actual numbers can be a powerful activity. For example, stakeholders may have always suspected disparities among people in jail, but they’ve never seen the actual numbers that show the size of the discrepancy and which groups are most affected. This information often inspires people to rethink policy.
What Is a Jail Overview?
A jail overview provides you with a data-informed perspective of your justice system. It helps identify where you can improve and serves as a baseline for future changes. Dr. Tammy Meredith, co-founder and partner at Applied Research Services (ARS), explains how a jail overview can contribute to your pretrial improvement process.
Preparing the Jail Overview
A jail overview provides your jurisdiction with a high-level analysis of who is in your jail, why they are there, and how long they stay. It answers the following questions:
- How many people are in your jail? What is the number of jail bookings and average daily jail population over a specific and preferably recent period of time?
- Why are they in your jail? Were they convicted of a crime or are they being held pretrial?
- Who is in your jail? What are the jail population’s demographics? What are the most common charges for which the pretrial population is held?
- How long do they stay and how are they released? For the pretrial population, what is the average (mean), typical (median), and longest length of stay? By what method are people released, for example, by secured/unsecured bond and/or to pretrial services?
The final product—a handout or series of slides—should depict this information in a brief, compelling, visually appealing format.
Finding the Data
To complete your jail overview, request jail information from the owner of the data. In most jurisdictions, this will be the sheriff’s office, department of corrections, or county IT department. Jails keep records of the volume of people booked, housed, and released from their facilities. They also capture demographics, charges, pretrial release conditions, case dispositions, and length of jail stay. Depending on what data your jail captures, you may need additional information from the courts or other sources.
Use this resource, Jail Overview Questions (.doc), to guide your data request and analysis.
Tips for your meeting with the jail data contact
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- Be as specific as possible in your data request. For instance, request data on all people booked into the jail during the past five years and all people sitting in the jail on January 1 or June 1 of this year (whichever is most recent).
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- Request records without any personally identifying information such as name or date of birth. This is called “de-identified data.”
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- Explain how the information will be used and that it will not be shared publicly.
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- Specify the format in which you’d like to receive the data. A spreadsheet is often most convenient.
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- While jails may record data by charges, you want an analysis of people. So, you may need to ask either your data analyst or the data owner to summarize each person’s charges.
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- Don’t be surprised if the jail doesn’t have all the data you need for the jail overview. Once you identify what the jail can provide, determine if you need to consult other data sources. Typically, either the courts or pretrial services will have data to fill in the gaps.
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- Once you complete your analysis, review your findings with the jail data contact to ensure they accurately reflect the data you were provided.
Presenting the Jail Overview
Ask someone who is familiar with spreadsheet programs to prepare the jail overview presentation. Using the data you received, create relevant charts and graphs similar to this example.
Here are some practical suggestions for presenting your data to your system and community stakeholders:
- People have different learning styles. Try to present data in multiple formats to reach people who want to see, hear, and interact.
- If your meeting is held in a room with a computer and projector, prepare slides to review. Keep bullets and words to a minimum for high visual impact.
- Be clear and concise in your language. Use short sentences and avoid complicated jargon.
- Outline the sources of your information and briefly explain your process for obtaining and vetting the data.
- Rather than reading through each statistic, point out key figures and call out areas of interest or potential change. Data often speaks for itself, but it can also be used to present a narrative or larger idea.
- Highlight important discoveries, for example, sudden increases or decreases over months or years.
- Facilitate a discussion and pose questions to the stakeholders. Ask what surprised them. See if anyone has an explanation for any issues presented in the data.
- Be prepared for pushback. It is not uncommon for stakeholders to question the accuracy of the information or the reliability of its sources. Discomfort with new information is common.
- Listen. Don’t try to answer all questions in one meeting. A jail overview should provide a high-level summary and lead to follow-up questions that can be addressed in future meetings.
- Create a printable handout version of your slides with titles, notes, and data sources.
Start with a “guess, then tell” approach. Ask each person to use sticky notes to anonymously write down their answers to two or three questions, such as:
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- What percentage of people in our jail are awaiting trial?
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- What is the average length of stay in jail for people awaiting trial?
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- How does the number of people in our jail awaiting trial compare with the state average? Is it much higher, higher, about the same, lower, or much lower?
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- What is the ethnic/racial breakdown of people in our jail?
After each question, collect the sticky notes and put them in a cluster on the wall or whiteboard. When you are done with all of the questions, take a moment to look for trends in the responses. Share those trends with the team. Then, move to your presentation on the jail overview.
Remember that digesting new data is a process, not an instantaneous event. To make real change in your pretrial system, system stakeholders and community members will rely on data to first identify what they want to change and then to demonstrate progress toward that change. That’s the power of data.
