Meet the Team

Caleb�Hamblem

Tianyunxi�(Emily)�Yin

Nick�Miller

Lance�Santerre

Ian�Duke

Confronting the US Prison Crisis

• The United States’ incarcerated population has increased by more than 500% since 1970. This explosion in the country’s incarceration rate has resulted in increasingly more facilities being understaffed, overpopulated, and locked down.

- Unexpected prison lockdowns and overpopulation often disrupt criminal defense investigations and adversely affect the lives of incarcerated individuals. This unjust reality motivates the following questions:

• How can we best document and analyze rates of overpopulation and lockdown in federal prisons?�
• How accurately can we predict risk of overpopulation and lockdown in the short-term future?

Inspiration for JDC’s First Application: �The Prison Operations Snapshot

Centralized database�of federal prison data�simply does not exist

Aggregated operations statistics would help both individual-level and class-action cases

Reliable predictions about future risk of lockdown and overpopulation may help legal professionals better coordinate investigation logistics

Our product is designed to provide valuable insights to all who care about this issue: defense attorneys, defense investigators, social justice advocates, and families of incarcerated individuals.

Closure statistics are “a persuasive way to argue to a judge that these facilities [are] dangerous or unable to offer the resources that a client deserved or was entitled to… Being able to say, like, well, the facility is on lockdown, you know, 30% of the time… I can see that being helpful.”��- Steven Marcus,�Former Law Clerk to Supreme Court Justice �Sonia Sotomayor

“If we could really produce data about ways they’re putting people in solitary confinement, lockdown information could really help.”��- Jacob Hutt,�Staff Attorney at Prison Law Office

Prison Operations Snapshot: �Application Pipeline

* such an architecture incurs zero cost– allowing the research team to obtain and store data before securing funding *

Application Features

Feature #1: Operations Snapshot

Application Features

Feature #2: Operations Predictions

How does JDC predict future lockdowns?

Forecasted �Precipitation�and�Temperature

Forecasted �Population

State Political�Affiliation

Gender Identity�of Incarcerated Population

Frequency�of Prior�Lockdowns

How does JDC predict future lockdowns?

The nitty gritty…

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Our best performing model was a random forest that achieved the following test set metrics when predicting future closure:

�

• Accuracy: .93
• Precision: .74
• Recall: .61

Next Steps:�Where and How We Hope to Inspire Change

Next Steps:�Where and How We Hope to Inspire Change

https://www.facesofmassincarceration.com/

Introducing JDF:�justice-data-collaborative