29,637 Bookings for Whatcom County Jail covering the 4.5 year period from 1/1/2011 to 7/1/2015. The vertical axis represents 17,256 unique names. 5,314 of those unique names had multiple bookings for the period with a range of 2 - 22 bookings per individual. Each unique name receives a random color for their bookings. See an animation of this chart here. See R code here. See notes on data/methodology at end. Click on the Charts to enlarge.
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This post discusses recidivism in Whatcom County jail. Recidivism is a primary concern for law and justice and citizens. The bottom line on 'recidivism' is this: so many re-offend at such high rates that some criminology professors fundamentally doubt whether imprisonment has any significant effect on prohibiting crime. Literature on this subject is abundant[1,2,3,4]. Some of us have come to the conclusion that imprisonment itself is the primary cause of recidivism; a counter intuitive analysis that has little political chance of wide scale adoption. I am looking at 'booking recidivism' or booking 'return buckets' in Whatcom County over the 4.5 year period from 1/1/2011 to 7/1/2015. (e.g. How many times a user is "booked" in that period. For this definition of recidivism, I am counting multiple bookings or returns to jail per individual (user). These aren't necessarily convictions. What I describe are 'return buckets' to our jail. Here are granular views at the 'return buckets' by user booking counts for these 4.5 years. Click to enlarge chart.