Extracting Data from the American Carceral State
Talk by Professor Sharon Dolovich, UCLA Law.
Abstract
From the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, it was clear that people living in carceral settings faced an outsized risk of infection and death. In mid-March of 2020, I began keeping track of various data points relating to this aspect of the emerging threat. What started as a two-table spreadsheet rapidly grew to become the go-to clearinghouse in the United States for all available data on COVID in detention. By mid-2020, among other things, the data collected by the UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project (BBDP) was being used by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) to populate its COVID-19 prison tracker. In 2023, BBDP pivoted to a new focus on all-cause carceral mortality and today maintains the most comprehensive database on deaths in custody in American prisons, jails, and detention centres – again substituting for the federal government, which since 2017 has failed to comply with Congressional mandates to collect and publish this data. This talk will provide an overview of this data-collection work – how it began, how we do what we do, why it is necessary, and what we can learn about the failures of the American carceral system from the fact that so many stakeholders have come to rely on the data we produce to make sense of what is happening inside the black box of our 6100 prisons, jails, and detention centers.
Bio
Sharon Dolovich is Professor of Law at UCLA and one of the leading scholars on prisons, punishment, and prisoners’ rights in the United States. Her research examines the constitutional and moral limits of incarceration, with particular attention to prison conditions, solitary confinement, state responsibility, and the lived realities of imprisonment.