What Can You Do With Government Data? Bust Politicians, That's What
Public data from the government - is it an opportunity for innovation and essential accountability or a snoozer that no one really cares about? Government transparency advocacy group The Sunlight Foundation offers one example today of something that can be done with government data that is clearly worth doing - but the data they used hasn't been made available on the Obama administration's anemic new data repository Data.gov.
Virginia Senator, Jim Webb, has a bill going through hearings that would create a National Commission to study and make recommendations on the reform of US criminal justice laws and practices. Twenty eight other Senators have signed on in support of the bill, but cross referenced statistics shed some interesting light on those Senators still standing on the sidelines.
Sunlight downloaded a CSV list of prison populations in all 50 US states and created a map to visualize which states have the largest prisoner populations. Cross reference those numbers with the list of supporters who have singed on to the National Prison Commission Bill and what do you see? Surprise, surprise, not a single Senator from the three states with the biggest prison populations (California, Texas and Florida) are excited to see the the current criminal justice system studied and reformed.
That disinterest could be a matter of economics or satisfaction with the status quo. Or the aversion to studying the matter may represent a desire to avoid embarrassment. The explanation can't be drawn from the data, but it is good data to have. It's not data that Data.gov will help you get your hands on. That catalog of public data remains limited to some of the least controversial data sets online. Three weeks after it's launched, Data.gov keeps adding more and more data sets to its collection - but a search for the word "prison" still brings up zero results.
Take a country with the highest documented incarceration rate and total documented prison population in the world, where under-represented ethnic groups are incarcerated multiple times more than the dominate majority population. Isn't that the kind of situation where you'd like to know whether or not a politician supports just studying the matter? Who does and who doesn't? Easy access to government and public data can help shed important light on current events like this and that's why people get excited about calls to open data up to the public in better and better ways.
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Dividing by the populations of each state to show a per-capita incarceration rate would surely make more sense though.
"Kevin, that would be another data point for sure. Those are three of the most populous states in the country, but when it comes to bulk bodies behind bars - per capita or not those three are the ones with the most invested in the issue, no?"
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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June 12, 2009 12:41 PM
Kevin, that would be another data point for sure. Those are three of the most populous states in the country, but when it comes to bulk bodies behind bars - per capita or not those three are the ones with the most invested in the issue, no?
I agree with the per capita argument, however, it's an interesting analysis nonetheless. What strange bedfellows ... Boxer and Feinstein seeing eye to eye with Hutchinson and Cornyn. Where's the partisan gridlock? This is a great illustration of the line between convictions borne in political philosophy and pragrmatism.
The three states with the largest prison populations also correlate with the three states with the toughest school standards with which textbook publishers must comply.
If there is a relationship, it may be with governments who demand strong compliance with government intentions.
Kevin,
in some ways you're illustrating Marshall's point. With closed data it would be hard to do the check you're proposing... but with open remixable data, it's probably very easy. There are 2 thing we need though, the data in an open format and the data in a findable place. data.gov SHOULD be that place. Every time you think about US government data you should be able to find it at data.gov if it exists at all.
What Can You Do With Government Data? Bust Politicians, That's What http://bit.ly/XSbLE [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2135546415]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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June 12, 2009 3:00 PM
I think the logic here by each state's population to show a per-need to think before most logical thinking
"Dividing by the populations of each state to show a per-capita incarceration rate would surely make more sense though"
Not so sure if what you're looking for is $$$ generated by the system. Still, both visualizations are pretty interesting. I recomend having a look at Edward Tufte's work, a real grammar for these kind of graphic designed data http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
Great post Marshall, I'm definitely gonna translate & adapt this one for the french edition, won't help evangelizing the local government I'm affraid ;-)
Great post Marshall
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