OVERVIEW
as of 6 am August, 21 2010
This document can be downloaded from http://3rdchimp.com/files/August2010Summary.pdf.

Lincoln County (LC) maintains a website. Among other things it provides a roster of people held in the LC jail (http://lto.locktrack.com/public/reports/lincol_or_ilist.html). The jail typically houses about 150 people on any given day.

The listing provides descriptions of each inmate, the crime(s) with which they've been charged, and the dates, when available, of when they were lodged in the jail, date of next court appearance and when they will be released. Court appearance and release dates not always populated.

Each inmate has a unique identifying ID number (SID) as well as, occasionally, an FBI ID number, a “TIP” ID number and a booking number. The SID is used to connect booking records with personal descriptions and the current list of charges against the inmate. The particulars of the charges are not static and change over time.

The personal description of each inmate includes a mug shot along with the person's first name, last name, middle initial, race, sex, height, weight, hair color and eye color. The races currently used in these profiles are HISPANIC, WHITE, BLACK, ASIAN, UNKNOWN, and AMERIND.

There are one or more charges for each inmate. The information tracked in the charges table are the docket number, a statute ID (often, but not always, derived from Oregon legal codes. i.e. 811.140 [reckless driving] would appear as 811140]), and a brief description of the charge in English (e.g. DRIVE UNDER INFLUENCE INTOX). Each charge may appear multiple times for each inmate. The inmate's bail status is also listed. That may be a dollar amount, or one of “not set” or “not allowed,” depending on court proceedings.

A simple sampling script that takes a snapshot of the roster is run on a computer four times per day (midnight, 6am, noon, and 6pm). This simply captures the HTML document offered on the public web page. An analysis script is run later for each snapshot which parses the HTML and extracts the data described above and places it in a group of data base tables for later analysis. Monitoring began February 14, 2010.

SUMMARY

As of today, August 21, 2010, there have been 1093 different inmates and there are 151 currently present. The summary is based on 100,144 records from 649 samples. A total of 197 different charges, seven more than last month, appear in the records. By race, the overall record shows 68 UNKNOWNs, 69 HISPANICs, 66 AMERINDs, 19 BLACKs, 11 ASIANs and 1,041 WHITEs.

The first figure shows the LC jail population distribution by race over the monitoring period. This shows the variation of raw numbers of overall per-race populations in the jail over the monitoring period. Compared to the previous month there has been no obvious change in the non-white population of the jail since the last summary. Overall occupation for August 21, 2010, 151, is about average. However, there was a drop in overall jail occupancy earlier in the month, around August 3, followed by a rapid rise back to normal around August, 10. There were no particular news stories over that period to account for this dip.

It resembles a similar pattern from April 4-10, although the earlier downtrend and subsequent recovery were less rapid in April. Further observation may reveal if this is a regular feature or just a coincidence.

Problems were encountered over this period. Four samples had to be discarded because they were incomplete. Since the data is collected automatically, without oversight, the incomplete records were not detected until later and it isn't possible to reconstruct what wasn't properly collected the first time.

The next graph shows the same data normalized to a percentage to better show the per-race distribution of the jail population over time. The proportion of the non-white jail population is relatively low for the observation period.

As of August 21, the distribution is as follows:

• UNKOWN  3 ( 2%)
• HISPANIC  4 ( 3%)
• AMERIND  7 ( 5%)
• BLACK  2 ( 1%)
• ASIAN 0( 0%)
• WHITE  134(89%)