Historical Data

Background

The UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project, launched in March 2020, tracks the spread and impact of COVID-19 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-19 in prisons, jails, and other correctional centers.

Prison and jail data overview

We primarily collect data from federal, state, and local correctional agency websites using web scraping programs we developed to automatically collect reported data three to four times per week. Our newly scraped data, updated 3-4 times a week, is available in our data repository. For details on the specific code we use for scraping data, please visit our scraper repository.

Our core data of interest include:

• the cumulative number of infections among incarcerated people and staff,
• the cumulative number of deaths among incarcerated people and staff,
• and the cumulative number of tests among incarcerated people and staff.

However, correctional authorities vary in what they report publicly. For example, as of December 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections reports data for all six of these core variables, while the Mississippi Department of Corrections reports data for only one.

Further, we aim to collect and report Covid-19 facility-level data, where possible, from all federal, state, and county correctional agencies across the country. In general, the Federal Bureau of Prisons reports its Covid-19 prison data by facility. However, not all state and county jurisdictions report data disaggregated by facility for all variables. Please visit our website for more info on data availability.

When data are not available publicly, we make every effort to obtain missing information through original public records requests. In some cases, we also partner with other organizations who gather data directly from agencies. Our data for several jails in California is collected by Davis Vanguard, who have been generously sharing their COVID-19 data with us. Our data for state prisons in Massachusetts is reported by the ACLU of Massachusetts. If you would like to contribute data on COVID-19 in a facility that we don’t currently include, please see our template. We always welcome additional contributors!

Historical Data Availability

We are in the process of cleaning historical data going back to the beginning of the pandemic. Currently, the states with historical data available are:

> 01) Alabama
> 02) Alaska
> 03) Arizona
> 04) Arkansas
> 05) California
> 06) Colorado
> 07) Connecticut
> 08) Delaware
> 09) Florida
> 10) Georgia
> 11) Hawaii
> 12) Illinois
> 13) Indiana
> 14) Iowa
> 15) Kansas
> 16) Kentucky
> 17) Louisiana
> 18) Maine
> 19) Maryland
> 20) Massachusetts
> 21) Michigan
> 22) Minnesota
> 23) Mississippi
> 24) Missouri
> 25) Montana
> 26) Nebraska
> 27) Nevada
> 28) New Hampshire
> 29) New Jersey
> 30) New Mexico
> 31) North Carolina
> 32) North Dakota
> 33) Oregon
> 34) Pennsylvania
> 35) South Carolina
> 36) South Dakota
> 37) Tennessee
> 38) Texas
> 39) Utah
> 40) Vermont
> 41) Virginia
> 42) Washington
> 43) West Virginia
> 44) Wisconsin
> 45) Wyoming

We aim to have all states’ data cleaned by early summer 2021.

Access

Instructions for accessing our historical time-series data are provided in our main data repository.

Data dictionary

Variable	Description
Facility.ID	Integer ID that uniquely identifies every facility
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 from which the data was scraped
Residents.Confirmed	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals infected with COVID-19
Staff.Confirmed	Cumulative number of staff infected with COVID-19
Residents.Deaths	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who died from COVID-19
Staff.Deaths	Cumulative number of staff who died from COVID-19
Residents.Recovered	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who recovered from COVID-19
Staff.Recovered	Cumulative number of staff who recovered from COVID-19
Residents.Tadmin	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals tested for COVID-19
Staff.Tested	Cumulative number of staff tested for COVID-19
Residents.Negative	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who tested negative for COVID-19
Staff.Negative	Cumulative number of staff who tested negative for COVID-19
Residents.Pending	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals with pending test results for COVID-19
Staff.Pending	Cumulative number of staff with pending test results for COVID-19
Residents.Quarantine	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals in quarantine from COVID-19
Staff.Quarantine	Cumulative number of staff in quarantine from COVID-19
Residents.Active	Non-cumulative number of incarcerated individuals infected with COVID-19
Population.Feb20	Population of the facility as close to February 1, 2020 as possible. Source listed in Source.Population.Feb20
Residents.Population	Up-to-date population of incarcerated individuals reported by DOC website or public records.
Residents.Tested	Ambiguous metric of incarcerated individuals tested for COVID-19
Residents.Initiated	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who have initiated COVID-19 vaccination (i.e. received any dosage of a vaccine).
Residents.Completed	Cumulative number of incarcerated individuals who have fully completed their COVID-19 vaccination schedule
Residents.Vadmin	Cumulative number of COVID-19 vaccines administered to incarcerated individuals
Staff.Initiated	Cumulative number of staff who have initiated COVID-19 vaccination (i.e. received any dosage of a vaccine).
Staff.Completed	Cumulative number of staff who have fully completed their COVID-19 vaccination schedule
Staff.Vadmin	Cumulative number of COVID-19 vaccines administered to staff
HIFLD.ID	The facility’s corresponding Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data ID

Additional geographic fields: Address, Zipcode, City, County, Latitude, Longitude, County.FIPS.

For more information on facility descriptors such as Description, Security, Different.Operator, etc, please visit our facility data repository.

Citations

Citations for academic publications and research reports:

Sharon Dolovich, Aaron Littman, Kalind Parish, Grace DiLaura, Chase Hommeyer,  Michael Everett, Hope Johnson, Neal Marquez, and Erika Tykagi. 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/.

Data licensing

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.