LAJC Expungement Project

Project to help the Legal Aid and Justice Center with analysis to support efforts to expand criminal record expungement reform in Virginia.

For more details, see the project page on the Code for Charlottesville website.

Quick Links

Getting Started

Currently, data for this project is stored in a PostGreSQL DB only accessible from Code for Charlottesville's JupyterHub deployment, avaliable at tljh.codeforcville.org.

If you do not yet have login access for JupyterHub, but you would like to get connected and help out, please reach out via the questions box at the bottom of the above project page.

For examples of connecting to the database, see the examples/ folder.

Example of connecting from a Python notebook: templates/db_example_python.ipynb

About the Data

Data for this project comes from VirginiaCourtData.org, a website with data pulled from government-published court data. Read more on the Project Page.

ALL DATA IS INTENTIONALLY ANONYMIZED. By design, none of this data is tied to individuals or personal identifiable information, and uses anonymized IDs to associate records.

Database Documentation

Visit the database documentation on dbdocs.io 🔗

The above documentation site is generated from va_courts.dbml, a database schema definition file written in DBML (Database Modeling Language).

Note: DBML is a very new open source standard for database documentation backed by Holistics.io, the company behind dbdocs.io, which we are using for the above docs. To learn more, see the DBML Homepage.

Running Project Scripts

This repo contains code for both analysis and data pipelines/processing (including classifying whether charges are eligible for expungement).

Data processing tasks can be executed via the main.py entrypoint CLI.