DOI: 10.3886/e104560v5
title: California Jail Profile Survey 1995-2019

description: <b>Version 5 release notes: <br></b><b></b>Updates data through September 2019 (third quarter of 2019 in the quarterly data).<b><br></b><b>Version 4 release notes: <b><br></b></b><b></b><b></b>Updates data through December 2018 (fourth quarter of 2018 in the quarterly data).Adds a date column for the data sets with a month variable. This is defaulted to the first of the month and is purely for some graphing software that uses Date type variables for time-series graphs.<br><b><b><br></b></b><b>Version 3 release notes: <br></b>Updates data through September 2018 (third quarter of 2018 in the quarterly data).Fixes bug where some jurisdiction names were replaced with NA.<b><br></b><b>Version 2 release notes: <br></b>Updates data until June 2018.<br><br>This data is the Jail Profile Survey from California. These data include highly detailed information about the inmates in jails in the state at the jail-month level and the county-month and county-quarter level of analysis. <br><br>The data was scraped from the California Board of State and Community Corrections' website here https://app.bscc.ca.gov/joq//jps/queryselection.asp<br><br>There are three data sets available: facility/jail-level data monthly, county-level data monthly, and county-level data quarterly. Each of these data sets offers different variables. All the data sets have the variables indicating the years, month (or quarter), and jurisdiction (in most cases the county sheriff). I added variables with the FIPS county and state codes and county names from the US census. <br><br>The PDF available for download is the instruction manual from the California Board of State and Community Corrections to employees who submit the jail survey data. This manual indicates how variables are created and can help with understanding the data. I recommend reading it before using this data. <br><br>I did not make any changes to the except for the following: Changed column names to make it more informative and shorten names to fit the 32 character limit for Stata. Some cells had the values D and U to represent Does Not Apply and Unavailable. In both of these cases I changed those cells to NA. I did this to allow the column to be numeric for analysis. <br><br><b>Variables in Facility/Jail-Level Data Monthly</b>Name of facility/jail<br>Population capacity for the facility (if any)Average daily population for unsentenced malesAverage daily population for unsentenced femalesAverage daily population for sentenced malesAverage daily population for sentenced femalesAverage daily population total<b>Variables in County-Level Data Monthly</b>Average daily population for unsentenced malesAverage daily population for unsentenced femalesAverage daily population for sentenced malesAverage daily population for sentenced femalesAverage daily population totalAverage number of felony inmates unsentencedAverage number of felony inmates sentencedAverage number of felony inmates total<br>Average number of misdemeanor inmates unsentencedAverage number of misdemeanor inmates sentencedAverage number of misdemeanor inmates totalDay of month where county had most number of inmatesThe number of inmates on that dayAverage daily population of maximum security inmatesAverage daily population of medium security inmatesAverage daily population of minimum security inmatesNumber of mental health cases opened last day of monthNumber of new mental health cases open during monthInmates receiving psych medication on last day of monthInmates assigned to mental health beds on last day of monthInmates seen at sick call during monthDoctor occurrences during monthOff-site medical appointments during monthDental encounters during monthInmates assigned to medical beds on last day of monthAverage number of inmates not assigned to housingAverage number of inmates in contract beds in other jurisdictionsAverage number of federal inmates in facilities (by contract)Average number of state inmates in facilities (by contract)Average number of other county inmates in facilities (by contract)Average number of inmates sent or awaiting contract to prisonAverage number of inmates in hospitals outside jailTotal number of inmates booked during monthTotal number of pretrial released due to lack of housingTotal number of sentenced inmates released due to lack of housingTotal number of juveniles in custody<b>Variables in County-Level Data Quarterly</b>Number of inmates classified as "3rd Strike"Number of inmates classified as "2nd Strike"Number of unserved felony warrants in countyNumber of unserved misdemeanor warrants in countyPercent of inmates believed to be illegal aliensNumber of inmates assaults on staffMoney spent on medication in previous quarterMoney spent on psych medication during previous quarterAverage length of stay (in days) for all released inmatesAverage length of stay (in days) for pretrial releases<br>Average length of stay (in days) for sentenced inmate releases<br><b>The code used to scrape and clean this data is available here: https://github.com/jacobkap/california_jails</b><br>
description: Persons incarcerated in California jails.<br>. Smallest Geographic Unit: Jail facility