Social Media Data for Social Justice: Mobile Patrol

• In Event: Social Movements & Mass Media

Abstract

In the 1980s, John Irwin (1985) concluded that the county jail’s “primary purpose is to receive and hold persons because they are ‘offensive’” (18) rather than hold perpetrators of serious crimes. More recently, national level jail population analyses confirm and expand Irwin’s conclusions, demonstrating that jails most often hold people too poor to afford bail for low-level crimes. Irwin’s study used booking records and the goodwill San Francisco’s reform minded Sheriff, while national jail datasets largely rely national surveys. For contemporary, reform minded researchers working in local, rural communities, however, both methods have serious limitations. Pro-incarceration sheriff’s are often skeptical of reform academics and the surveys only provides snapshots of jail population demographics at given points in the year. The adoption of social media technologies by local sheriff’s departments, however, have created new data sources allowing real-time and long-term data collection. This research uses the victim right’s application Mobile Patrol to gather, chart/map, and analyze jail population demographics, local geographies of incarceration, and charges during a one-month period in a small-urban New York county. Results re-confirm Irwin’s and later studies’ conclusion. The reform advocacy value of data gathered through Mobile Patrol and other social media outlets is also discussed.

Author

• Andrew J Pragacz, Binghamton University