investigate "other" prison deaths

[EvaRuthM]

• In 2023, there was a spike in deaths in Texas prisons with the cause listed as "other." This data set (CDRs from the Office of the Attorney General) is available on our website -- apply filters for prison as facility type and cause as "other," then download that data set for all the available columns (including one for "other, specify").

  • To see the summary field in the CDRs (the fields that are currently not included in our data set), you can find them in the individual reports here.

• A second data set is the DCRA data that on our drive here: TJI Drive --> Data --> CDR_Data --> DCRA_quarterly_reports. That set might provide additional details about deaths, and it also might contain more or less deaths than the data on our website. The DCRA data is submitted quarterly to the Department of Justice as required by federal law.

[manasakumarappan]

• [ ] pull list of "others" in this year versus other years
• [ ] grab CDR summaries and paste in new column from the list above
• [ ] do textual similarity pattern recognition
• [ ] cross check with known heat related deaths (and language included in other types of deaths)
• [ ] create list of suspect cases that merit further investigation
• [ ] store in local dataset