Data Storytelling
India’s Judiciary Strains its Jails — A Case Study of Data Storytelling
If your data doesn’t tell a story, then no one is going to act on it. If your data doesn't help someone act, then it is just raw numbers. Raw numbers don’t help anyone. In this article, I explain that with the help of right charts you can tell a story using data. Let’s go!
In this post, I explain how I go about writing stories using data. For this example, I take Prison Statistics India 2022 from National Crime Records Bureau, Government of India. The raw data can be found here. As can be seen here, there are around 99 data tables which have a lot of numbers. Not everything is important. The first question therefore is how do I decide which data points or indicators are important for me.
The Fundamental Question for Data Storytelling
“What action can my audience take after looking at this statistic?” When I write data stories, or when I am doing data analysis, I like to ask myself who the audience of my analysis is going to be and what action do I want them to take after looking at the statistic. Let us go through some of the indicators on the page one by one and see which data points can we use, and which ones can be left out.
The first group of indicator is “Prisons — Types and Occupancy”. There are various tables in this group. The first table is “Types of Jails in the Country”. When I look at the table, it shows me different types of jails in all the states of India. How can it help me? It can’t. I like to call these indicators factual indicators or situational indicators that tell me about the situation, but doesn’t help me take any action.
However, if my audience wanted to compare the availability of different types of jails for the available population in a state, then it could have helped me by generating indicators such as per person availability of jails in State A is less than that of State B. I could have further broken it down by saying that the per person availability of Jail A in State A is higher than Jail A in State B. This could help us question such as, “Do we need more jails?”.
Moving forward, the second question is about the occupancy rate of jails in Indian states. Now, this is an helpful indicator as it can help me take actions about avoiding overcrowding in jails. Overcrowding in jails is not good because it can lead to unhygienic living conditions, diseases outbreak, inmate attacks, and also more work for the jail staff.
The question I need to ask myself now is if I want a choropleth map or a bar chart can help me with this indicator.
Which chart is right for me?
Because I have spatial information, I can decide to go with a geographic choropleth map to discover the geospatial elements. However, the question is if I want to see the raw data, or I want my audience to walk away with something else. Let us compare two charts below.
The image on the left shows the raw numbers plotted on the map of India to show that the states in central part of India are more overcrowded than rest of the states. However, the chart on the right shows that almost all the states of India barring a few have overcrowded prisons. Therefore, this is a pan-Indian problem. I will go with the image on the right, because I just want my audience to know that the prisons pretty much across the country are overcrowded. I do want them to know at this state that how much the occupancy rate is.
The same indicator is now repeated for all the different types of jails. Because I am looking at the data of whole country for all types of jails, I will not go into the details and will leave rest of the indicators. So, from the first group of indicators, I select the one which shows me that the Indian prisons are overcrowded. The natural question that comes to the mind is who lives there.
Can we know more about the inmates in these overcrowded jails?
The next natural question to ask is why are jails overcrowded. Is it that more people commit crime in India or is it some other factor. The ratio between convicts and undertrials can show us this relation. Let us plot that on a choropleth.
The charts above show the percentage of undertrials in the total population of prison estimates. This chart shows that in many states of India, the prisons are full because the inmates are awaiting judgement on their cases from the judiciary or there are other factors which make them an undertrial prisoner. The slow justice means that the Indian jails are bearing the brunt of all undertrial prisoners.
The charts above show that many states where the occupancy rate was more than 100% also tend to have a lot of undertrial prisoners. The data about these undertrial prisoners from the same dataset show that close to 33% of the population of undertrials have been waiting for justice for over a year. If they would have gotten a timely justice, they would have either left the place or would be convicted, thus reducing the burden on unplanned jailed expenditure.
What can we do?
The group of data from Prison Statistics gives an estimate on the annual budget and infrastructure of Indian jails. Because making the judiciary faster or more efficient is not directly under the hands of Indian government because of the Indian Constitutional structure, they need to find out ways they can make the conditions better. Let us look at that data.
The first immediate action that comes to mind is hiring more jail staff for better management of prisons and prisoners. Lack of staff also results into lack of prisoners management. And many states don’t have the full cadre strength that have been mandated by the Indian government.
The second import factor is ensuring that the annual budget sanctioned is used entirely for the jail infrastructure. Many states are able to use only up t0 90% of the annual fund released to them. One of the reasons that can be attributed to this is the lack of staff. More staff would enable more decision-making hours of the jails to invest in infrastructure development.
Conclusion
There are three major key messages that can be taken up after reading this analysis.
- Indian prisons are overcrowded because they have a lot of undertrials in prisons.
- Indian prisons need to hire more staff.
- Indian prisons need to invest the annual budget sanctioned to them for jail infrastructure.
This is an example of how data can help make decisions effectively. For more articles and blogs, follow me on Medium and LinkedIn.
