Data Origin

County Data Dashboards on Bail and Sentencing

These four dashboards use criminal court data that is collected at the county level from different sources:

• Harris County District Clerk (data extract)
• Dallas County District & County Clerks (website)
• Travis County District & County Clerks (data extracts)
• Bexar County District Clerk (website)

Bexar County Probation Data Dashboard

These four dashboards use criminal court data that is collected at the county level from different sources:

• Bexar County District Clerk (website)
• Texas Department of Criminal Justice [TDCJ] Community Justice Assistance Division (Community Supervision Stat Book)

Data Updates

Across all of our dashboards, the data gets updated at different frequencies, based on its availability from the source:

• Bexar County - weekly
• Harris County - monthly
• Travis County - annually
• Dallas County - none
• TDCJ Community Supervision Stat Book - annually

Data Transformation

Across all of our dashboards, we geocode the Home Address fields and jitter them to obscure the exact location for mapping.

For our four county data dashboards, we transform the data in the following ways:

• Calculate the Age at Filing by subtracting the Date of Birth from the Filing Date.
• Cross reference the Court Number and fill in the Judge Name who presided over that court in the year of Filing Date.
• Standardize the Sentence Length into units of days. In the report, it is a text field that contains units of years, months, or days.

Notes

The dashboard attempts to represent these data as accurately as possible.

There are minor exceptions that are not represented in the four county data dashboards:

• Bail amounts that are greater than 2x standard deviation from the mean are not represented on the charts, but are still taken into account in all other areas of the dashboard. This is to prevent charting extreme outliers and skewing the visual representation of bail trends.
• Guest judges who are substituting for regular judges are unaccounted for in the data. In these dashboards, the Judge's name is a direct proxy for the Court number.
• People marked as homeless, no known address, unknown address, and so forth, are not represented on the map. Their data is represented everywhere else in the dashboard.
• Only the original sentence is represented in the dashboard trends. The dashboard removes duplicate case information for people who had their deferred adjudication or probation revoked.

In the Bexar County Probation Data Dashboard, the summary page reports the number of people assigned probation and the number of people that have completed probation. If 100 people have been assigned probation and 35 have completed probation, it is not accurate to assume that the other 65 are still on probation. The data does not clearly indicate which cases have ongoing probation terms and which have been revoked. Thus we can only definitively state the number of probation assignments and completions.

Across all of our dashboards, the data available for download includes some of the original data as well as some of the transformed data. We have removed personally identifiable information in these dashboards and their file downloads. All of this information is publicly available, and researchers can reconstitute a complete dataset using the Case Number to validate any findings.