UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data

The UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project, launched in March 2020, tracks the spread and impact of COVID in American carceral facilities and advocates for greater transparency and accountability around the pandemic response of the carceral system. Since March, we have been collecting and reporting facility-level data on COVID in prisons, jails, and other correctional centers.

About Our Data

Our core dataset includes information on COVID cases, deaths, tests, and vaccinations across more than 1,700 state, federal, county, and immigration correctional facilities. We maintain this dataset by scraping and standardizing data from 100+ sources. Our scraper production code is available on GitHub. We are also developing an R package behindbarstools, which includes a variety of functions to help pull, wrangle, and visualize our data. We strongly recommend using this package to access our data.

The majority of the facilities that we collect data on are state prisons, where COVID data is reported on Department of Correction (DOC) websites. We also collect data from federal prisons reported by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), immigration detention centers reported by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), juvenile detention facilities, and several large county jail systems – including Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Maricopa County, Orange County, Cook County, and Hennepin County.

June 2021 update: In response to less frequent data updates from correctional agencies, we will only scrape and publish data twice weekly (down from 3-4 times weekly). We will continue archiving raw files from 100+ sources 3 times weekly, but we will not publish this data at the same frequency.

Directory Structure

The directory tree below summarises the data files that we maintain in this repository:

data/
    |— latest-data/
    |   |— latest_facility_counts.csv
    |   |— latest_state_counts.csv
    |   |— latest_national_counts.csv
    |   |– latest_state_jurisdiction_counts.csv 
    |— historical-data/
    |   |— historical_facility_counts.csv
    |   |— historical_state_counts.csv
    |   |— historical_national_counts.csv
    |   |– historical_state_jurisdiction_counts.csv 
    |– anchored-data/
    |   |— state_population_counts.csv 

Files in the latest-data directory include only the most recent counts based on our latest scraped data, while files in the historical-data directory include all historical time-series data that we've collected since the start of the pandemic. The files in anchored-data include population data that we update on a monthly basis to use as denominators when calculating rates.

Data Files & Dictionaries

_facility_counts.csv

• Row definition: Each row represents a unique facility (or the most granular level of aggregation reported by an agency).
• Facilities included: Includes adult and juvenile state facilities, federal facilities, immigration detention facilities, and county jail systems. This file only includes information that we collect directly from agency websites.

Variable	Description
Facility.ID	Integer ID that uniquely identifies each facility. Additional facility information can be linked to the data files here based on this ID
Jurisdiction	Whether the facility falls under state, county, federal, or immigration jurisdiction
State	State where the facility is located
Name	Facility name
Date	Date data was scraped (not necessarily date updated by the reporting source)
Source	Source(s) from which the data was scraped
Residents.Confirmed	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals infected with COVID
Staff.Confirmed	Cumulative number of staff infected with COVID
Residents.Deaths	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who died from COVID
Staff.Deaths	Cumulative number of staff who died from COVID
Residents.Tadmin	Cumulative number of COVID tests administered to incarcerated individuals
Residents.Tested	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals tested for COVID
Residents.Active	Number of incarcerated individuals currently infected with COVID
Staff.Active	Number of staff currently infected with COVID
Population.Feb20	Population of the facility as close to February 2020 as possible
Residents.Population	Current population of incarcerated individuals (most recent data available)
Residents.Initiated	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who have received at least one dose of a vaccine
Staff.Initiated	Cumulative number of staff who have received at least one dose of a vaccine
Residents.Completed	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who are fully vaccinated
Staff.Completed	Cumulative number of staff who are fully vaccinated
Residents.Vadmin	Cumulative number of vaccine doses administered to incarcerated individuals
Staff.Vadmin	Cumulative number of vaccine doses administered to staff
Web.Group	One of Prison (state adult facilities), Federal (BOP facilities), ICE (ICE facilities), Juvenile (state and local youth facilities), or County (county jails)
ICE.Field.Office	3 letter code for ICE Enforcement and Removal Office (only included for facilities under ICE jurisdiction)

We also include the following geographic fields: Address, Zipcode, City, County, Latitude, Longitude, County.FIPS.

_state_counts.csv

• Row definition: Each row represents a state prison agency (DOC), with federal (BOP) and immigration (ICE) totals reported as separate rows.
• Facilities included: Includes adult state facilities, federal facilities, and immigration detention facilities. Data from county jails are NOT included in these aggregates, as our data for these facilities is not comprehensive. This file supplements information reported directly on agency websites with statewide totals collected by The Marshall Project.

Variable	Description
State	State agency, Federal, or ICE
Residents.Confirmed	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals infected with COVID
Staff.Confirmed	Cumulative number of staff infected with COVID
Residents.Deaths	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who died from COVID
Staff.Deaths	Cumulative number of staff who died from COVID
Residents.Tadmin	Cumulative number of COVID tests administered to incarcerated individuals
Residents.Tested	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals tested for COVID
Residents.Active	Number of incarcerated individuals currently infected with COVID
Staff.Active	Number of staff currently infected with COVID
Residents.Initiated	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who have received at least one dose of a vaccine
Staff.Initiated	Cumulative number of staff who have received at least one dose of a vaccine
Residents.Initiated.Pct	Cumulative percent of incarcerated individuals who have received at least one dose of a vaccine
Staff.Initiated.Pct	Cumulative percent of staff who have received at least one dose of a vaccine
Residents.Completed	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who are fully vaccinated
Residents.Completed	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who are fully vaccinated
Residents.Completed.Pct	Cumulative percent of incarcerated individuals who are fully vaccinated
Staff.Completed	Cumulative number of staff who are fully vaccinated
Residents.Vadmin	Cumulative number of vaccine doses administered to incarcerated individuals
Staff.Vadmin	Cumulative number of vaccine doses administered to staff
Residents.Population	Current population of incarcerated individuals (most recent data available)
Staff.Population	Current population of staff (most recent data available)

_national_counts.csv

• Row definition: Each row represents a COVID metric.
• Facilities included: Includes adult state facilities, federal facilities, and immigration detention facilities. Data from county jails are NOT included in these aggregates, as our data for these facilities is not comprehensive. This file supplements information reported directly on agency websites with statewide totals collected by The Marshall Project.

Variable	Description
Measure	COVID variable (as defined in the dictionaries above)
Count	Total reported by state and federal agencies (including 51 DOCs, BOP, and ICE)
Reporting	Number of agencies included in the total (of 53 agencies)
Missing	List of agencies that do not report data for the given measure (not included in the total)

_state_jurisdiction_counts.csv

• Row definition: Each row represents a unique combination of State, Web.Group, and Measure.
• Facilities included: Includes adult and juvenile state facilities, federal facilities, and immigration detention facilities. This file supplements information reported directly on agency websites with statewide totals collected by The Marshall Project.

Variable	Description
State	State where the facility is located
Web.Group	One of Prison (state adult facilities), Federal (BOP facilities), ICE (ICE facilities), or Juvenile (state and local youth facilities)
Measure	COVID variable (as defined in the dictionaries above)
Val	Total reported by facilities in a state of the given Web.Group type
Rate	Estimated rate based on a population denominator of February 2020
Date	Date data was scraped (not necessarily date updated by the reporting source)

state_population_counts.csv

• Row definition: Each row represents a state prison agency (DOC), with federal (BOP) and immigration (ICE) totals reported as separate rows.
• Facilities included: Includes adult and juvenile state facilities, federal facilities, and immigration detention facilities.

Variable	Description
State	State agency, Federal, or ICE
Residents.Population	Current population of incarcerated individuals (most recent data available at the beginning of each month)
Staff.Population	Current population of staff (most recent data available at the beginning of each month)
Date	Date (month and year) updated

We aim to collect population data as of the first day of each month (i.e. july2021 would correspond to July 1, 2021), but data may be older depending on when an agency last reported data. When agencies do not publicly report data, we supplement this file with information collected directly through public records requests, along with data reported by The Vera Institute for Justice and The Marshall Project.

Citations

Citations for academic publications and research reports:

Sharon Dolovich, Aaron Littman, Kalind Parish, Grace DiLaura, Chase Hommeyer, Michael Everett, Hope Johnson, Neal Marquez, Erika Tyagi, Megan Arellano, and Lauren Woyczynski. UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project: Jail/Prison Confirmed Cases Dataset [date you downloaded the data]. UCLA Law, 2020, https://uclacovidbehindbars.org/.

Citations for media outlets, policy briefs, and online resources:

UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project, https://uclacovidbehindbars.org/.

License

Our data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means that you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may not use our work for commercial purposes, which means anything primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation.

Contributors

For questions or feedback about the data, please reach out to COVIDBehindBars@law.ucla.edu.

In cases when agencies do not publicly report comprehensive data for all facilities in a state, we supplement our data with statewide aggregate totals collected through public records requests, data collected by The Marshall Project and the AP, and other sources. Our data for several jails in California is collected by the COVID In-Custody Project. Our data for facilities in Massachusetts is reported by the ACLU of Massachusetts. Our data for deaths in Texas jails and prisons is collected by the Texas Justice Initiative. If you would like to contribute data on COVID in a facility that we don't currently include, please see our template.