Evil Doer

So I found some Bureau of Prison public APIs last week and decided to build a system that generates charts to show historical trends on facility population as well as more general stats for BoP.

For example, here you can see that in the last month, the Bureau of Prisons have 8,195 more inmates and 299 less staff. Seems like a winning combo… lol

Or when looking at an individual facility’s page, you can see (for example) how San Diego MCC has had inmate population grow by 5% in the last 2 weeks.

This is what happens when you give nerds access to data.

I’m not going to lie, for being a government agency the BoP website is a pretty good resource. Quite a bit better than some other government websites you try to find information on.

They even have public JSON APIs to let you get at different bits of data (things like inmate statistics and prison population broken down by facility).

Too bad the data is only as of “now” and doesn’t let you make charts to see historical trends (for example it would have been nice to see historically how populated a facility has been before you ask a judge to recommend placement there).

Hmmmm…

Now that my sentencing is complete, I’ve been able to move on to more important things in life like praying to Baby Jesus that I would be assigned a sweet vanity prisoner number.

I had asked him for either 11111-111 or 12345-678 (I did my research and saw that neither were taken yet).

I’m guessing the Bureau of Prisons intentionally does not give out prisoner numbers that are *too* awesome, but either way, I did get one that is pretty choice. This is something that even *I* can remember…

For the nerds out there, it looks like you can pull federal prisoner data programmatically via JSON. Here’s mine: http://www.bop.gov/PublicInfo/execute/inmateloc?todo=query&nmateNumType=IRN&inmateNum=13411-111&output=json