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55 Wake Forest L. Rev. 821 (2020)
The Transparency of Jail Data

handle is hein.journals/wflr55 and id is 852 raw text is: THE TRANSPARENCY OF JAIL DATA William E. Crozier,* Brandon L. Garrett,** & Arvind Krishnamurthy*** Across the country, pretrial policies and practices concerning the use of cash bail are in flux, but it is not readily possible for members of the public to assess whether or how those changes in policy and practice are affecting outcomes. A range of actors affect the jail population, including: law enforcement who make arrest decisions, magistrates and judges who rule at hearings on pretrial conditions and may modify such conditions, prosecutors and defense lawyers who litigate at hearings, pretrial-service providers who assist in evaluation and supervision of persons detained pretrial, and the custodian of the jail who supervises facilities. In the following Essay, we present the results of a case study in Durham, North Carolina. We began this project in the fall of 2018 by scraping data portraying daily pretrial conditions set for individuals in the Durham County Jail. The data was scraped from the Durham County Sheriff's Inmate Population Search website and details the individual's name, charges, bond type, bond amount, court docket number and time served. Scraping was initiated on September 1, 2018, * Post-doctoral Fellow, Center for Science and Justice, Duke University School of Law. ** L. Neil Williams Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law, Director, Center for Science and Justice at Duke. *** PhD. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Duke University. We thank the editors of the Wake Forest Law Review for their hard work organizing the symposium that this piece is a part of. We are extremely grateful to Sean Chen of the Duke Law Library, who created the web scraper that collected the data examined in this Essay, to Alyson Grine, Daniel Spiegel, Joshua Sotomayor, Sarah Willets, and the Durham District Attorney's office, for their feedback on earlier drafts, to the Durham County Sheriff s Office for sharing insights with us, and to the Durham County Public Defender's Office for their data and feedback. We thank Sandra Mayson, Colin Starger, Ron Wright, and the participants at the Wake Forest Law Review symposium, for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts. Our data and analyses code are available online (https://osf.io/9tgcf). 821

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