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COVID-19 hit some populations particularly hard: individuals in nursing homes, people who work in close proximity to each other in meat packing plants, and both the offenders and the officers in the criminal justice system. In Texas, the Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) chose to make their COVID-19 data open and available so everyone, the State’s leadership, the public, and their population’s family members, could have a full understanding of the situation.
 We interviewed Karen Hall and Jason Clark from the TDCJ, along with their colleagues in the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), to learn not only how they created such a great interactive dashboard and website, but more significantly, how they had the foresight to allow their seemingly sensitive information to be publicly available. Their collaboration provides a great lesson to the GIS and emergency management community: know your audience’s information needs and make sure you build something they can use.
Importance of Transparency
Clark explained that very early into the event, TDCJ began to think about how their facilities would be affected. At first, they only had a handful of cases, but they knew there was the potential for spread. They quickly took a lot of precautions, which included PPE, but it also meant restricting the movement of their population. But, restricting movement has an impact on not just the incarcerated individual, but also their families: “When you impact lives you have to be as transparent as possible as to why you are taking those measures. We wanted to let everyone know: This is what we are doing and this is why.”
Help Your Audience Find the Information
The department wanted to tell the story of what was occurring, but they knew they had to provide it in a visual format. They created a website that included information on testing, pending tests, those in isolation, etc. However, as the event continued to unfold, the website became unwieldly. So, they turned to TDEM for GIS and other technical support so their data could be easily consumed by the family members.
“We wanted a place to be able to point people to so they could get real information. We had to stop visitation and when you do that—there is an information vacuum. When families don’t know what is happening with their loved one they begin to speculate and worry. That’s why we felt it was so important to have real-time information all the way down to the unit level.”
Understand the Requirement
When the TDEM GIS team stepped in, they quickly learned a big part of the requirement was information accessibility. This involved some steps they might not have considered on other projects: the icons are machine readable, the methodologies and all terms are clearly defined, items open in new tabs, and so on. The GIS team admitted, these were things they did not normally consider for internal emergency management maps.
One other key requirement was the need for the dashboard to be mobile friendly. TDCJ specified that one of the main audiences was families of the offenders and the majority of them would be viewing the content from their mobile devices.
Recovery
Thankfully, more and more offenders are recovering every day. Clark said the data is also valuable to decision-makers so they can understand when it will be safe to open back up: “The decisions impact the offenders and their families—in a meaningful way.”
Thank you to both TDEM and TDCJ for this great story. For more information: visit their site at: https://www.tdcj.Texas.gov. Should you have any questions about their amazing effort, contact either Karen Hall Karen.Hall@tdcj.texas.gov; or Jason Clark at: Jason.Clark@tdcj.texas.gov.
View the Texas maps and apps, as well as more than 500 other pieces of content from our state, regional and NGO partners in FEMA's COVID-19 Geospatial Resource Center.
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