This repository contains data and analysis regarding criminal cases in Texas municipal courts. The findings are referenced in the BuzzFeed News article, "The Ticket Machine", published January 26, 2016.
The analysis depends on data collected and published by the Texas Office of Court Administration, for fiscal years 2013-2015. This analysis uses two fields in particular: 1) the number of criminal cases disposed, and 2) the number of cases where fines were satisfied by jail time.
The raw data can be downloaded here.
This repository's texas_municipal_court.ipynb notebook reformats the raw data, and then ranks municipal courts by the percent of total criminal cases disposed where fines were satisfied by jail time. The results support the following finding:
- "In fact, traffic and other fine-only offenses result in jail at a higher rate in Port Arthur than most other cities in the state, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of Texas court data."
Since not all courts reported or accurately reported their data, it's not possible to provide a definitive ranking of all cities, but the analysis shows that Port Arthur ranks among the highest given the available data.
To re-run the analysis yourself, you'll need to install the libraries listed in requirements.txt and open the texas_municipal_court.ipynb notebook in Jupyter/IPython.
Email the author at kendall.taggart@buzzfeed.com.