Descriptive Analysis on Prison Capacity Data

[lindsaypoirier]

In this repo, there is a file called:

proximity-app/prison_boundaries_centroids.csv

This file has the location of the centroid for each prison in the US. There is a variable in the dataset called CAPACITY, indicating the maximum number of inmates for which there are beds or may be jailed (not fully defined in data dictionary) . We could use some basic descriptive analysis of the values in this field. It may also be useful to compare this field to the POPULATION variable, which is also in the dataset. Question to consider might include:

• What is the distribution of prison capacities?
• Are prisons with higher capacities concentrated in certain areas?
• What happens to the distribution if we group by prison type?

[lindsaypoirier]

Learned that almost half of observations don't have a prison capacity value listed. Hesitant to filter to a certain number when there is so much missing data. Instead we are thinking that we will gather user input to allow filtering to prisons with certain reported capacities, including a note that the data is missing for several observations in the dataset. Also allow user to filter to prison type (federal, state, etc) - allowing to filter for multiple.