Reference no: EM133260093

For this week's discussion, I want us to try something new and to get some practice navigating the Vera Institute of Justice Incarceration Trends website. It's a website that we will be using more later in the semester, and I hope you're take some time to click around and get used to it this week.

1) Go to trends.vera.org. This is a site with detailed data for local jail incarceration data for almost every county and big city in the United States. The site has data about jail incarceration *rates* (expressed as a rate per 100,000 people of working age), as well as pre-trial rates (people detained, most of whom can't pay bail), as well as data about racial disparities in jail incarceration.

2) Above the map of all the counties, select "Jail Incarceration." This will make it so that you see the trends for local jail incarceration.

3) Move the cursor over the different counties the map in Illinois and Indiana. Choose a county in Illinois or Indiana and click (please do not choose Cook County, IL).

4) After you click on the county, you will see a county page with lots of data about jail incarceration in the county.

For your discussion post:

a) Please tell us which county you choose, and what the most recently available data for the jail incarceration rate for this county.

b) What was the incarceration rate for this county in 1990?

c) What is interesting to you about the changes in jail incarceration over time in this county? What other questions, specific to this county, do you have? How might you go about answering these questions (what other data could you use, who could you interview)?

d) Anything else that you find interesting about this data, and questions that it brings up for you.

There are lots of counties in Illinois and Indiana! Please do your best to choose counties that your class mates have not already choosen.