I am going to try and continue an emerging development cycle of rotating the focus of my work on thesis by day between

development rotation cycle

1. Coding
2. Data research and 'washing'
3. Super-structure/story

{{build out}}

And today is Data day!

I am going to practice my data development in 4 stages

4 stages of data development

1. Clean Up

2. Collect

   • collect and register current data I have
   • what's missing?

3. Review and Process

   • Evaluating what I have and creating a project to find what I need.

4. Research

   • identifying data sets and sources that most justify and speak in the same voice as my project.
   • start research 2.0 on best, most current, and most complete data set for people in prison and jail by state in the U.S.

5. Prepare

   • scrub the data. I imagine this will involve some copy and paste and creating one big json file out of large sets of tabular or csv data.

6. Launch!

   • Live on the web!

Data Report: Clean Up and Collecting Data

• I am going to begin at step 0 and clean up the project folder and hierarchy for my project

Before

After

Data Report: Data Sources

For anything involving the cost of prisons, or keeping humans imprisoned, I am relying on the excellent research of the VERA Institute of Justice

For data regarding the actual number of people in jail and prison I have been working with a data report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice: Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Algorithm Development

Connected to the source data, I am going to continue to develop my 'algorithm sentence,' which as of the first iteration of my Getting To Zero project was

"If we release X percent of Y* people, it would save $ dollars and send Z number of people home."

• in my original this was Y percent of non-violent offenders. This is problematic, but supported by the data and might be a good way to meet people where they are at. The problematic part is that the call for prison abolition, is a call for the complete abolition of the imprisonment of humans, and seeks justice in roots deeper then the nature of a persons individual.

{{enter iframe or gif of original getting to 0}}