UCLA Law

(1) Indexing Departments of Correction COVID Policies The UCLA COVID Behind Bars Project has been capturing pages from Department of Correction (DOC) websites that discuss the departments’ responses to Covid-19. We have also identified a list of topics common to the Covid-19 responses (for example, visitation, testing, programming, etc.). The goal of this part of the project is to review our archived information and maintain a spreadsheet index that lists each capture and indicates which policy topics are mentioned in the capture. We can then make the index public so anyone who is interested can filter, sort, and review the different approaches of the DOCs. We have already collected and archived the policies from March 2020 until June 2021. New volunteers will be assigned a folder containing several DOC policies and, using detailed guidelines, look for any discussion of the listed policy topics. For each topic that appears in your document, you will mark a field in the index, stored in Google Sheets. Our goal is to give interested individuals and entities a roadmap into this information and hopefully reduce the time it takes to process the information, but we cannot provide a precise, universal, comprehensive dictionary. TIME COMMITMENT: Flexible. We ask that you commit at least 4 hours between 10/24 and 11/3 to help with this project.

(2) LA Jails Data Extraction UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project has been collecting information about COVID-19 testing, cases, and deaths in Los Angeles county jails using programmatic extraction. While our former pipelines have been sufficient to collect this data and monitor changes in COVID-19 related outcomes, more recent outbreaks among detainees in the LA jail systems has required our team to collect more detailed data about the LA jail systems that would be difficult to do programmatically. TASK: Access the extracted data and cross-reference with the historical archives. If data was mis-extracted (meaning the number recorded does not match the number in the dashboard), make a note and highlight the cell. TIME COMMITMENT: Flexible. We ask that you commit at least 4 hours between 10/24 and 11/3 to help with this project.

If you have questions regarding this volunteer opportunity, please contact Cece Bobbitt, Volunteer Coordinator at bobbitt2022@lawnet.ucla.edu or Hope Johnson, Data Science Fellow at johnsonh@law.ucla.edu