Two Regimes of Prison Data Collection

Column Editors’ Note: From risk assessment scores to facial recognition, data-driven tools have become central to policing and punishment over the last century, and they are also urgent sites of struggle and contestation. Presumptions about criminality—and the data collected in the name of tracking criminal behavior—prove to be deeply intertwined with other kinds of data sets, from the census and municipal records to that of insurance and mortgage companies. In this column, political scientist and historian Kaneesha Johnson traces the changing form and content of prison data and questions how and why different communities and institutions collect the data they do. In particular, she compares the data gathered about crime and incarceration by the U.S. government with data gathered by incarcerated people and their communities in part to show that what we measure, collect, and count is always a reflection of the world we are trying to create.