Computational Policy Lab
Building the country’s most detailed public jail dashboard.
In recent years, the City of St. Louis has seen a strong popular and political interest in criminal justice reform. However, the lack of quality and timely access to criminal justice data has been an obstacle to crafting intelligent policies to effect such reform. In 2018, SCPL received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety & Justice Challenge Innovation Fund to work with the City of St. Louis to create evidence-based tools and policies that reduce incarceration.
Over the past year, SCPL developed dashboards that describe the city’s current and historical jail population. This tool allows officials in the city’s Corrections Division to find immediate answers to questions that would have previously been difficult. In addition, by making this information public, the city and the public can have a more substantive conversation about corrections in St. Louis, such as closing the older jail facility in the city.
The city is slated to release a public version of our dashboard, which will provide more jail population information to the public than any other major jurisdiction in America today.
