The Initial Appearance Project: Using Data Scraped from the Web to Build Insight

• In Event: Research and Data in Indigent Defense: Using Research to Push Innovation

Abstract

In many parts of America, people can spend days, weeks, or months in jail before they come to court for the first time. But how often do people disappear like this? We don’t know because – ironically – the data on initial appearances are often invisible too. We demonstrate a novel web-scraping approach to investigating this problem. Our method doesn’t require agencies to cooperate in handing data over. Instead it uses techniques first developed in computer science to gather data from public internet sites that are hard to find and regularly purged. We demonstrate the method by parsing and matching data in three Iowa counties. We show that it is possible to track how long a person languishes in jail before they appear in court. We test the accuracy of our record matches. And we assess how many other jurisdictions in the nation might have enough data for analysis.

Authors

• Greg Guggenmos, Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center

• Pamela Metzger, Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center

• Andrew Lucas Blaize Davies, Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center