Section 1: Data Biography

The dataset we were given is a record of admission of prisoner numbers 20 through 1124 in the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from the years 1830-1839, including name, crime, place of origin, race, ethnicity, time in and time out, and an entry on moral and educational condition.The original source is from the American Philosophical Society, and this dataset was made y Library Science students at Drexel University, mostly Michelle Ziogas. It was produced and posted on 13 June 2016. Michelle Ziegler is an archivist at the Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, and volunteered at the American Philosophical Society with the clear purpose of transcribing records from the Eastern State Penitentiary to an accessible dataset for scholarly purposes. I can not find how the dataset was collected, but it looks like someone named Ashley Rubin wrote a book titled The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America’s Modern Penal System, 1829-1913 using the datasets. It talks about how this specific prison used solitary confinement regularly.

Section 2: Data Analysis and Visualization

I actually had to clean up this dataset in Excel for a bit before I used it. For the Sentencing block (time served in prison), there was some weird numbers. I took out all of the equational ones (6+3=9yrs, etc.), and I changed all of the ones that said 13 mos, 18 mos, 36 mos, etc. into the years and months format the rest of them were in. This allowed me a better dataset to work with. There were a couple of interesting things I found in this dataset. One was that the highest average age of inmates normally had a sentencing of 2 years 8 months. I made a chart with age and number of convictions, and the highest average age was 43 with 6 convictions. My favorite fact was my last one. I used the count of entries into the database (Count of Eastern_State_Admission_Book_A.csv) with the birthplace of the convicts. Unsurprisingly, the top birthplace was Philadelphia. The second was null, meaning no birthplace was given. The most interesting fact was that the third highest number of inmates came from Ireland, with 42 inmates.