Implement Sentence Length Section/Metric

[hobuobi]

Section: Sentencing

Should check how well this can be implemented in other states, but for now, this can be a TN-only feature.

Metric

• Length of sentences for those currently incarcerated.
• Specific methodology is TBD, but should account for any consecutive and concurrent sentences to capture the maximum amount of time that someone is expected to be incarcerated.

Breakdowns

• Primary Charge / Offense (using Recidiviz mapping, not the raw offense type)
• Judicial District
• Demographics

Visualization & Controls

Grouped bars. For now, we can disable "ALL" as an option in this.

• Possible ways to organize this:
  • PREFERRED: Primary Offense as the primary filter; judicial district is primary split; race is secondary split. (Makes it easy to compare judicial districts. Will also need to decide how to sort the judicial districts.
  • Judicial District as the primary filter; primary offense is primary split; race is secondary split. (Makes it easy to see the compare differences in sentencing for different offenses.)

Proposed Design

Default, showing the sentence lengths per district for property crimes

Showing the sentence lengths per district for property crimes, broken down by race. Could reveal the racial biases of certain judges.

A few quick notes:

• Splitting by Judicial District is necessary for comparison, but introduces a bit of visualization complexity because there are often many judicial districts in a state. With this design, we will need to:
  • implement a way to scroll or pan horizontally across the bar graph, and
  • sort the judicial districts by average sentence length, highest to lowest

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Full implementation depends on implementing Offense/Charge Breakdowns.