Prairie Fire newsletter: How indie researchers are filling gaps in federal data

This past year, political interference in America’s knowledge infrastructure caused researchers across disciplines to lose faith in data collected and published by the federal government. The actions by the Trump administration to remove or alter public information induced shock and dismay among researchers. Academics, scientists, and volunteers rushed to compensate for a government that was no longer a neutral publisher. Researchers in the prison reform movement, on the other hand, were not surprised.

“The criminal legal system is an area that has been suffering from a lack of data for so long that…I don't think there's that same impetus to grab onto each other and close ranks,” explained Wanda Bertram, communication strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative. “The people who are working in prison studies have learned not to trust the narratives that are coming out of the government.”

In my conversation with her last month, Bertram told me that federal data relating to the United States’ massive carceral system has been lacking for decades. The last time the Bureau of Justice Statistics published its Survey of Inmates in Local Jails was 24 years ago, for example. And plenty more datasets have been delayed, not nearly detailed enough, or called into question regarding their accuracy.

In order to provide a clear picture of jails and prisons, independent researchers have developed their own methods of data collection and analysis. This research has supported journalists and advocacy organizations, leading to change in an intentionally opaque institution.

I think this story is worth sharing—some methods may be applicable to other, more recently impacted research fields. Here are some key organizations working to shed light on the carceral system, and how they’re doing it.

The Jail Data Initiative (JDI)

• Compensates for a glaring lack of information on jail populations by collecting data themselves

  • “We’ve had county offices coming to us for data. Sometimes a jurisdiction can’t answer for itself how many people it has jailed,” said Orion Taylor, lead data scientist at JDI.

• Scrapes daily rosters from public jail websites, resulting in a dataset that reveals population trends

• Supports further investigations of jail populations and conditions

  • JDI data was used for research into the impact of pretrial detention and bail practices on re-incarceration rates, as well as COVID-19 outbreaks in jails in 2020

The Marshall Project

• Conducts surveys via News Inside, their in-house magazine serving prison populations. Their survey of incarcerated people’s political views conducted in 2024 received 54,000 responses.

• Creates resources to help journalists and researchers uncover information on the carceral system, including a toolkit geared toward replicating the 2024 political views survey.

The Vera Institute

• Fills in missing sexual orientation and gender identity data (SOGI data) through working with advocacy organizations like Black & Pink National to conduct surveys.

  • “Marginalized groups who are less trusting of government-led data collection efforts will be more responsive when there's a trusted partner organization involved,” said Vera associate director of research, Dr. Jennifer Peirce, explaining the partnership with Black & Pink.

• Captured qualitative data with open-ended questions in their 2024 Advancing Transgender Justice survey, compensating for a small response pool by allowing participants to submit detailed answers that could not be collected through prison administration

The Prison Policy Initiative

• Analyzes and aggregates government data for a more complete picture of the carceral system, and produces reports based on independently-collected and liberated data.

• Creates means and opportunities for further research

  • Maintains a directory of their synthesized datasets, along with a library of peer research

  • Identified pre-DOGE gaps in legal system data in their “data wishlist for 2025.”

From the Prairie Fire blog: AtlasPlus data now available

A volunteer with the Data Rescue Project (DRP) scraped and uploaded the CDC’s AtlasPlus databases. The AtlasPlus tool, which is still up on the CDC’s website, allows researchers to create visualizers out of HIV, hepatitis, STD, and TB data, along with social determinants of health (SDOH) indicators. Although the tool is fairly accessible, the databases it draws from were not—until now. The script the volunteer used to download the data files is also available in the DataLumos upload.

Keep up with the DRP and the latest news affecting researchers on the Prairie Fire blog.

Help a Data-Dealer: seeking ICE code breakers

Orion Taylor at the Jail Data Initiative is working on scraping data from ICE detention centers. The problem: detainees are only listed by a nine digit “A-Number” code. Taylor is looking for a way around the code so the JDI can sort detainees into public-facing rosters. If you have information or suggestions to share, contact JDI at this address: questions@jaildatainitiative.org.

(Do you have an announcement, question, or call to action for our Prairie Fire community? Send your Help a Data-Dealer requests to morgan@newsjunkie.net)

I’ll leave it here

The carceral research field is just one slice of the independent research sphere that Prairie Fire serves. While the methods mentioned here may not directly translate to orphaned NOAA projects or missing health data, I think there's value in studying resistance to information control, no matter the form.

You have peers in the knowledge sector that have been in this fight for a long time, and they’ve gained experience you can learn from. Even if surveys or scraping are not applicable to your work, I'm hoping the efforts of these independent knowledge seekers inspire you to keep developing your own methods of resistance. We'll be back to the hard sciences soon enough.

Until next time, data-dealers.

—Morgan