Data issues

There's still quite a lot of data to triage across the many jails, but here are some general observations:

• Some jails (e.g. Harrison County, MS) require that you provide at least two characters in the "Last Name" field, otherwise no data will be provided. These jails are currently not scraped.
• Some jails don't consistently provide case or charge data.
• Jails do not consistently use all the features of JailTracker. For example, there are some redundant date/time fields in the API, but often only one will be set.
• Most fields seem to be input by hand, so it can be hard to consistently code the data. (For example, some fields I would expect to use a dropdown/selection on input must instead be a text input, as the data clearly varies.)

Release

Some jails provide a slightly different search feature: not only can you search by first and last name, you can filter by Current, Released (within a date range), and All inmates. Most omit this entirely. This is noted in config.json as HasAdvancedSearch.

Some observations about release data:

• If I query the listed inmates on a jail that doesn't provide the "advanced" search, I don't think I ever see a release date.
• arrestNo's seem to be incremental IDs (and they seem to be tracked per-jail)
• The inmate list API endpoint often skips a number of sequential IDs.
• Querying one of these for Marion_County_Ms, I do get an inmate response, and the special field Date Released: is set!

Many of these jails have either been using JailTracker for a long time, or were able to import older data from whenever they adopted it. For example, I've seen a jail with data from 2011. So it seems very plausible to pull down a lot of historical data that currently isn't turning up.

Charge data

I'm interested in how long people are held without charge. Unfortunately, the "charge" data format doesn't include when a charge was filed. Some results of that:

• It's difficult to look at existing charge data to determine the length of time between an arrest and when the charge was actually filed.
• Through regular monitoring, however, we can at least identify when the charges appeared in JailTracker to generate leads for further research. For example, scraping a jail daily over time can indicate that someone has gone N days without charges being added to their record.
  • Note that this still only tells us that the record hasn't been updated! Further research would be needed to confirm they haven't been charged.
• Some jails do list an arrestDate and courtTime with the charge, in which case we can get information on how long those people are held pre-trial.

Given that historical data does seem to be available (see above) it might be possible to get data about how long people were held without charge before being released.