“We’re excited about deploying simple interactive tools that puts highly-requested data at the fingertips of taxpayers, researchers, and academia,” said Secretary Jimmy Le Blanc, Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. “It’s simple, yet comprehensive, and serves a great purpose in accomplishing our mission of serving the public.”

This first deployment of dashboards were published late last year to provide users with information on the agency’s incarcerated population and population of individuals on community supervision by the Division of Probation and Parole. These dashboards provide basic population demographic information such as gender, race, and sex, while also providing users the opportunity to look at information related to sentence length, time served, crime categories, age, and parish of conviction.

The team continues to build upon the initial model and recently deployed new dashboards which provide users access to information about prison admissions and releases. The new dashboards provide the opportunity for users to see annual admission and release data by year beginning in 2018. These dashboard provide users both basic demographic information such as age, race, and sex, but also information related to admission and release type, length of sentence by admission type, admissions by crime types, age at admission and age of release, and time served by crime type category.

Secretary Le Blanc noted, “Louisiana has long been a national leader among Correctional organizations related to the amount and type of data we collect. Unfortunately, we have historically been somewhat limited, often by our information system designs, in our ability to evaluate information in real time to support data informed decision-making. I am excited about the work of our Data team to develop these visual dashboards, both for our own interagency use, but also to offer to the public a new level of transparency in data about their criminal justice system.”

The Department is exploring other data applications to provide information about Louisiana’s criminal justice system. As those come on line, the public will be made aware of the availability.