Who is in the Marion County Jail? Exploring Length of Stay through an Equity Lens

The pre-trial risk assessment was piloted in Allen, Bartholomew, Hamilton, Hendricks, Jefferson, Monroe, Porter, St. Joseph, Starke, and Tipton counties. (source) There was also a seperate list of pilot counties for the community supervision assessment, which is available here.

Yes, every county in Indiana uses this system, including Marion County Community Corrections. This audit from 2020 contains specifics about the system’s implementation.

Yes, all members of MCAT teams receive training, including the officers. Details of the training are explained in this evaluation, but in summary, the training includes a mental health overview, crisis intervention training, police and safety, first aid, and awareness of systems and programs. Also, since 2021, all new recruits undergo an interrupting racism training.

This is a weakness in data collection and data systems at the Marion County Jail, and is a common problem across Indiana. Gender information is only connected as binary “male” or “female” values.

This analysis does account for people with multiple charges. When discussing statistics about bookings or people, these include bookings and people with multiple charges. When discussing charges or offenses, we associate one charge with each booking: the most severe charge. Each charge has a code that notes its severity. This is a useful lens for analysis, but it does “flatten” some of the depth in the data. The most severe charge may not be the initial offense that caused the police to respond to the incident. For example, a traffic stop could escalate to a charge of resisting arrest.

We worked with the Marion County Sherrif’s Office to receive an export of data from their database. We then stored this in our own secure database. Other analysts in Indianapolis have experimented with scraping data directly from the city’s Inmate Lookup Tool.

This could be the subject of a future analysis. Seventy percent of bookings had the address where the arrest was made, and 98 percent of inmates had a residential ZIP code. Very few inmate records had an exact residential address (0.3 percent).

Yes, suicide alerts and segregation alerts are both subsets of mental health alerts, so they are included.

There were 2,795 inmate records marked as homeless in our dataset. That information essentially was collected beginning in 2018, though a very small number of records have address information (2 percent) before 2018. We do not know where they were released unless it is to a hospital, home detention, or another correctional facility. A focus on these homeless inmates could be the subject of a future analysis.

On any given day, 50 to 60 percent of people in jail are there for a violent offense. Murder is a rare crime, and there have been only 151 bookings for murder since 2018. However, these bookings have resulted in 45,276 bed-days, the 23rd highest of all offenses.

Date of birth is available in this dataset, but it was not part of this analysis. This would be an important dimension for future analyses.