Bureau of Justice Statistics: New Survey of Prison Inmates Data Analysis Tool (SPI DAT). “BJS has launched a new Survey of Prison Inmates Data Analysis Tool (SPI DAT). The dynamic analysis tool modernizes public access to the most recent SPI data (2016) with interactive data visualizations.”
Los Angeles Times: California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation. “At a time when most consumers enjoy free or low-cost calling, prison phone calls at their peak in California cost more than $6 per 15 minutes via a private telecommunications provider. That allowed only hurried, superficial conversations between the siblings — with one eye always on the clock. This year California became the second state in the nation, and the largest to date, to mandate free calls in state prisons.”
WKMS: Kentucky think tank launches tool to track state incarceration. “The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy is tracking the increase and causes of incarceration in the state through a newly launched website. UnlockKY shows the steady increase of incarceration in Kentucky, using a collection of data spanning back more than 30 years.”
NiemanLab: The Prison Newspaper Directory finds that the number of prison-based papers is growing. “The local newspaper industry has seen better days (though not so much in my lifetime). One growth spot, however, is where you might not expect it: Behind bars. According to the newly launched Prison Newspaper Directory by the Prison Journalism Project, there are 24 prison-based newspapers in 12 states. At least four of the papers were launched in the last year.”
UCLA Law: UCLA Law Releases New Database To Monitor Deaths In U.S. Prisons With Funding From Arnold Ventures . “…the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project is releasing a comprehensive public resource documenting prison deaths nationwide. Relying on each state’s public records law and publicly available reports, our team requested and gathered information on each death in U.S. prisons covering at least 2019-2020; for a few states, like Louisiana and Texas, we have relied on exceptional colleagues who had already collected the data in their states.”
Radio Free Asia: New search tool helps Uyghurs discover fate of missing loved ones in China. “The search tool was unveiled on Feb. 9 by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization. People can use it to search over 700,000 personal records of Uyghurs and Kazakhs who were among the total 830,000 individuals included in the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of millions of confidential documents hacked from Xinjiang police computers.”
Solitary Watch: New Report And Public Database Track Legislation To Limit Or End Solitary Confinement . “The first-of-its-kind report utilizes new data made available through the Unlock The Box Legislation Tracker, an interactive database of solitary confinement bills from 2009 to present day. Justice advocates, government officials and policy makers, and public citizens can freely access the Legislation Tracker to review state by state proposals and actions, as well as trend-based data visualizations.”
The Marshall Project: The Many Ingenious Ways People in Prison Use (Forbidden) Cell Phones. “…most of what I knew about illicit electronics came from press releases and news stories that offered example after example of all the bad things people could do with contraband phones, things like trafficking drugs, making threats and running scams. While it’s true those things can happen, over the past three years I’ve also seen a lot of people use their phones for good. Some use them to self-publish books or take online college classes. Others become prison reform advocates, teach computer skills, trade bitcoin or write legal briefs.”
Oklahoma Department of Libraries: The archivists at the Oklahoma Department of Libraries digitized 285 prisoner newsletters, spanning from 1937 to 1973, for you to view online.. “The newsletters were written by the inmates at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and Oklahoma State Reformatory. The collection consists of five different newsletters: The Eye Opener, Soonerland, Tidings, Granite Nugget, and the OSR News & Views.”
The Marshall Project: The Books Banned in Your State’s Prisons. “Over the past year, reporters for The Marshall Project asked every state prison system for book policies and lists of banned publications. About half of the states said they kept such lists, which contained more than 50,000 titles. We’ve created a searchable database so you can see for yourself which books prisons don’t want incarcerated people to read.”
Detroit Free Press: New Wayne County Jail dashboard offers statistics, charts in push for transparency . Wayne County is the most populous county in Michigan, with just under 1.8 million people. Its county seat is Detroit. “The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office and the Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network on Thursday morning announced the launch of a free, online database providing demographic figures, mental health data and other information on the county jail population.”
Washington Post: They’re locked up in D.C. — and learning how to code from MIT. “The last time Rochell Crowder held an office job, he said, it was 1983 and computers were not yet central to everyday life. But on Thursday, after almost four decades of odd jobs and crimes that landed him in and out of jail, the 57-year-old completed a computer science course taught by PhD candidates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Brown University: To advance research on incarceration, Brown acquires personal papers of prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. “The prison records, correspondence and artwork of Abu-Jamal, and related materials from advocate Johanna Fernández, will anchor a collection at the John Hay Library focused on first-person accounts of incarceration.”
Berkeley News: Overcrowding, old buildings fueled COVID in California prisons, says new report. “Overcrowding, sometimes in antiquated buildings, compounded by rapidly changing conditions and the need for complex coordination, helped to drive a dramatic surge in COVID-19 in California’s prisons, according to a new report from the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley.”
Johns Hopkins University: American Prison Writing Archive Moves To Johns Hopkins. “With the move, principal investigator Vesla Weaver, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of political science and sociology at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and Doran Larson, the archive’s founder and Edward North Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, plan for the new collective to aggregate 10,000 pieces of first-person witness, making it the largest digital archive of writings by incarcerated people in the world.”
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