Cook County Jail Inmate Population tracker

A Django app that tracks the population of Cook County Jail over time and summarizes trends.

Using it

There is currently no user interface or production website. You can run the scraper and summarizer with two management commands:

./manage.py scrape_inmates
./manage generate_inmate_summaries

scrape_inmates also supports a --limit / -l flag which limits the number of records created and --search / -s flag which overrides the default A-Z search strategy.

Architecture roadmap

Models

• Inmate: Name, charges, gender, intake date, discharge date, other fields available on inmate site (see a typical inmate record for details).
• Summaries: One or more models representing population summaries (number of inmates, length of stay, distribution of charges and demographics) by time period (day, week, month, quarter, year).

Management commands

• scrape_inmates: Create inmate records by searching and scraping Cook County jail website.
• generate_inmate_summaries: Summarize data (number of inmates, length of stay, distribution of charges and demographics) by time period (day, week, month, quarter, year)

Views

A handful of views export JSON representing summaries by time period.

Frontend

The front end will consist of Backbone components to be developed in January with the Chicago Data Visualization Group.

• Data views: Bind to JSON data and use D3 to visualize.
• Navigation app: Provide time selection and multiple views of data.