COVID-19 in California's County Jail System

The Covid In Custody Project (www.covidincustody.org) is an investigative data journalism initiative. We built a comprehensive public dataset on COVID-19 in California's county jails by scraping information from jail websites and open data portals, as well as public records retrieved from sheriff's departments via the California Public Records Act (CPRA). The project's data and findings are a leading source of insights for jails, and have been cited across public health, epidemiology, and policymaking studies.

This dataset focuses on infections, testing, vaccinations, and compliance with public health orders within California’s county jail system, which is managed by independent sheriff’s departments, in contrast to the state prison system, overseen by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Our live dataset is also accessible on GitHub: https://github.com/covidincustody/ca-county-jails-data/tree/main. For details on the variable definitions and aggregation process, please refer to the data dictionary. For details on our information requests to law enforcement agencies, visit: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VQr_BHHzCEwUH93qSXlsF3V2k1r6wAxi.