Meet the team!

Henna Hi, my name is Henna and I’m a fourth-year Statistics and Data Science major from the Bay Area. As a project manager, I was in charge of communicating assignment due dates and distributing tasks. I also helped with creating the website and finding sources.	Ryan Hello, I’m a 3rd year Computer Science major from Orange County, CA. As the data specialist, I was in charge of cleaning the dataset backing our research project. Using OpenRefine, I reformatted the data, making it easily interpretable and uniform throughout.
Carol Hi, my name is Carol Chen and I am a 2nd year Statistics and Data Science major from Sacramento! As Data Visualization Specialist, I make sure that our team’s graphs, charts, etc. are both accurate based on the data and easy to understand while being visually appealing.	Rae I’m a third-year Design Media Arts major and Digital Humanities minor at UCLA. In my role as a Web Designer, I was responsible for overseeing the design and structure of all the pages of the website and ensuring the look was cohesive. I customized and optimized WordPress themes to align with project requirements, research topic, and ensure accessibility requirements were met.
Madeline Hi, my name is Madeline Bonanni and I am a fourth-year Sociology Major and Entrepreneurship Minor from Manhattan Beach, California. As the Content Developer, I oversee the website by ensuring that the data visualization and maps integrate seamlessly with the written content.	Reagan Hi, my name is Reagan Hope and I am a fourth-year sociology major from Phoenix, Arizona! As the editor, I oversee and ensure the project’s design, readability, and accessibility. I made sure that all elements of the project are presentable and have a coherent narrative across the board. As a sociology major, I brought in a different perspective to analyze our narrative.

what went into our project?

Selecting Sources

To find patterns in California and Texas prison systems, we focused on comparisons between the two states, as well as how particular factors intersect in the criminal justice system. Before visualizing our data, we thought about what biases could occur during data collection, particularly underreporting (due to each facility/inmate’s willingness to participate), data standardization issues (due to the large number of facilities surveyed), and institutional barriers (due to the accessibility of the survey for inmates). We found that while there were a lot of participants for the survey, there were many values missing, making it important for us to acknowledge the limitations of the dataset when it comes to certain topics. Hayden White’s The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality prompted us to remember that narrativity can be shaped by representation of data, as well as the lack of. All narratives will be influenced by inherent biases, however, being aware of this reality can allow us to be more careful to decrease misinterpretations. We also looked at Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past which highlighted the weight of power dynamics in historical narratives. Voices which have power are more heard while those of disadvantaged and marginalized communities are silenced. Our research questions aim to amplify the voice of these silenced communities within the prison system. In addition to the 2019 Census of Jails data, we studied peer-reviewed papers and articles on mass incarcerations, policy changes, disproportionate representation, etc. These sources provided context for our understanding of the justice system in America, allowing us to be more properly educated to build an informed narrative. More information can be found on our Annotated Bibliography page.

Processing Data

To clean our dataset we used OpenRefine, however a large issue we faced with our data was a lack of data entries in certain columns. Our dataset contained a few variables that were self-reported, due to this there were many 0 or NA values. Our data still contained enough qualitative and quantitative data for us to use. It provided prison information for the states of California and Texas, per county. One of the largest issues there is inequality in the prisons and the justice system. While we considered looking into multiple different issues, we knew that inequality was extremely important. Using the main theme of inequality and the variables the data provided, we decided to further research inequality based on race, gender, age, crowding, and conviction status.

Presenting Narrative

To create our website we used WordPress, which provided lots of personalization tools. Our reasoning also came from WordPress’s flexibility that enabled our team to design a user friendly, visually appealing, and well structured website. WordPress additionally allowed us to edit the formatting to ensure accessibility. With the guidance from the UCLA Disabilities and Computing Programs, we were able to make an optimal experience for all users. We choose to go with a dark theme, using primarily black, white, and grey. We felt that this theme was appropriate for our data, and the sensitive topic we were discussing. To create our data visualizations we used Tableau, embedding the code for our graphics into our WordPress site to ensure they are interactive. For Timeline.JS, we also used the embed code the site provided. We felt it was important to use interactive graphics, as they are firstly interesting for the viewer, it is also much more informative than just an image. Being able to see exact data and numerics.

acknowledgments

Thank you to Dr. Wendy Kurtz and Julia Stoddard for your continued guidance and support throughout this project and quarter! We are very thankful to them and would like to express our gratitude!