More than four years in the making. Over 65,000 pages of government documents. Nearly a thousand records requests and over a hundred interviews. This is what it took to create the largest and most comprehensive database of conditions inside Illinois county jails.
Our interactive dashboard allows you to select your county and see the "extraordinary or unusual” events happening inside your local jail. Statewide, the data reveals hundreds of incidents of forced medication, fires, sex offenses, serious injuries and more — all occurring with little oversight from state officials.
We also found that at least 63 people who died in jails are missing from state data, that jail staff fired pepperball guns at mentally ill detainees through the food slots of cell doors, and that most jails fail to meet minimum safety standards year after year.
We are sharing how we did this investigation to help you understand how we came to the conclusions in our stories, to share ideas and to help people investigate jails in their own communities.
How we reported on Illinois county jails
Our project began in spring 2022 when an Illinois Answers Project reporter began filing public records requests for a particular form, the “Report of Extraordinary or Unusual Occurrences,” which jails must file with the state when certain kinds of events happen, such as escapes, riots and fights. The Jail and Detention Standards Unit (JDSU) within the Illinois Department Corrections (IDOC) receives thousands of these reports from jails each year.
To obtain the records, Illinois Answers negotiated with IDOC, which agreed to provide only the first page of each record, sent in batches grouped by month from 2019 onward. In total, we received more than 31,000 reports.
Illinois Answers partnered with the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, where researchers use interdisciplinary methods to tackle complex problems. With their help, we developed a pipeline that automatically analyzed our trove of documents using the Open Source Computer Vision Library, Google’s Tesseract optical character recognition engine and Stanford researcher David Lim’s Named Entity Recognition classifier model, which is itself based on Google’s Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or BERT, model. A full overview of that method is available on the Mansueto Institute’s GitHub page.
Because the forms were often handwritten, poorly scanned or had missing information, we also visually verified the accuracy of every digitized record using a program we developed in-house that displayed an image of a particular form alongside a data-entry tool.
Illinois Answers visually verified the accuracy of every digitized record using a program we developed in-house that displayed an image of a particular form alongside a data-entry tool. In order to track jail inspection data, we developed a set of tools to parse and read more than 24,000 pages of annual inspection reports released by IDOC covering every jail in Illinois going back to 2017. That tool was based on a library initially developed by Jeremy Singer-Vine, currently the data editor at the New York Times. We also read through every report — more than 800 — to find additional details and log them manually.
Through this process, we also requested records from every county in the state, often going to each county multiple times. Some counties received dozens of requests from us over the years. Illinois Answers also went back to IDOC to request additional pages of specific reports.
In order to find cases of people who died in jails but weren’t captured in official state data, reporters requested records from every coroner in the state and reviewed lawsuits, news stories and press releases. Reporters also cross-referenced the “extraordinary or unusual occurrences” dataset and reviewed records from Illinois State Police (ISP) and the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA).
But records are only one part of the story. Reporters also reached out to dozens of people who have been incarcerated and whose loved ones died in custody. Some reached out to us. Some we already knew from other stories. Some we contacted through social media or tools like LexisNexis to find phone numbers, emails and addresses. We also reached out through official jail or prison communication platforms, such as Cook County’s ViaPath messaging service.
Many people were generous with their time, but not everyone wanted to share their story publicly. We spoke with many people — former detainees, jail experts, government officials — who were never quoted in any of our stories.
For our coverage of deaths in Illinois jails, we also sent letters to the families of more than 200 people who died in custody. We spoke with dozens of those families, and many chose to share photos and information about their loved ones. A small number of families requested that we anonymize information about their relatives, which we did on a case-by-case basis.
How to investigate jails in your community
Throughout the process of reporting these stories, we’ve developed a toolkit to investigate jails. We want to share what we know to help you learn about how jails and municipal lock-ups operate in your community. It’s important to remember that every jurisdiction is unique, so your experience may be different.
Source up. Get to know people in your area who have spent time in jails, whether that’s as a detainee, employee, attorney, family or friend. While you can always fish for records, it’s usually fastest to speak with people who have direct knowledge of what’s happening and can point you in the right direction. Familiarize yourself with the various platforms used to communicate with people who are incarcerated. As always, proceed with caution, and be smart about your outreach.
Use publicly available records as a jumping off point. Check out our Illinois county jails database here. Other states, like Pennsylvania and California, also have some data online specific to county jails.
Ask for records, but be precise and ready to negotiate. A good place to start? Request a records retention schedule for the sheriff’s department, which should show you what records the department keeps and for how long.
These are some types of records that you me be interested in: incident reports, booking forms, use of force reports, injury reports, disciplinary records, training records, medical release records, policies, after action reviews, observation logs, jail duty logs, jail grievances, annual inspections, emails, commissary audits, bodycam videos, surveillance videos and, of course, reports of “extraordinary or unusual occurrences.”
Curious about how to write a public records request? Check out our template for Illinois here.
Always verify your data and know the limitations of your tools. Lots of software, like optical-character recognition (OCR) algorithms and language models, can make mistakes because of how they are built. Even a typo in an Excel spreadsheet can introduce noise to your data. If you have lots of records, go back and check some of them to make sure your data and your documents line up. If you’re doing a lot of math or data analysis, ask a friend or expert to read through how you did it to make sure it makes sense.
Look for trends in the data as well as outliers. If you do have data, either that you collected yourself or a dataset you got from somewhere, look for trends. Is an issue getting bigger or smaller over time? Is it more likely to appear in big cities or rural areas? Does something happen to one group of people more than another? And what is left out of the data entirely? These sorts of questions are a great way to find the heart of the story. It’s also important to find outliers — pieces of data that are way different from everything else. Most data-heavy fields exclude outliers from their datasets, but journalists often find stories because they notice one-offs and oddities. So never forget to investigate the edges of your data!
If you want to take a deep dive on analyzing data, journalist and educator Brant Houston’s Data for Journalists is a great book on the subject. Groups like Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) also have helpful guides on the best ways to collect and analyze data.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. We worked with people from different organizations, spoke with experts and collaborated on almost everything for our project. If you have questions about how to investigate jails, try calling a local expert like a retired sheriff, professor or community advocate. Of course, the Illinois Answers team is also ready to help if you have questions or want advice for your own project. Don’t be afraid to reach out!
This story was made possible by a grant from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation to the Illinois Answers Project.
This article first appeared on Illinois Answers Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
