JailJawn
Philadelphia Department of Prisons · daily census

Loading the census…

Every symbol below is one person counted that day. The timeline underneath walks through every day on record.

 
 people
 
0people
Snaps to the nearest day we have.
Pick a second date to see what changed.
Narrows the crowd and the charts to one facility.
Juveniles in adult facilities

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Children held in adult facilities, every day recorded

The city's own count of juveniles in its adult facilities, as published. The 2013–2017 points come from the first scraper.
Hover or tap for any day

Press Show the children above the timeline to find them in the latest crowd.

Thirteen years, a third the size

People held by the Philadelphia Department of Prisons, 2013 to today

The 2013–2017 record is sparse and comes from the project's first scraper. There is no record between July 2017 and March 2025.
Hover or tap for any day

Average count by year

Each bar averages the days recorded that year. Years with few days are marked.

The daily record

Every day since March 2025

Breaks are days the city did not post or the scraper missed.
Hover or tap for any day

The week has a rhythm

Average count by day of the week, shown as the difference from the average of all days.
Hover or tap a bar

Where people are held

People each facility is responsible for

Each panel has its own scale. The first and latest counts are printed. The gap between 2017 and 2025 is left open.
No longer in the census
Facilities and units that appear in the 2013–2017 record but not in today's.

Counted, but not in the building

The census also tracks people a facility is responsible for who are somewhere else at the moment of the count. Averages across every day of the daily record.

What the numbers keep saying

Worked out from the whole dataset each time this page loads, so they stay true as days are added.

The data

Since March 2025: one CSV with a row per day and a JSON file per day with the five tables as the city published them, committed to a public repository the morning each is captured. From 2013 to 2017: the first scraper's record, cleaned and documented.

census.csv · 2013–2017 summary.csv · Schema · Daily JSON · Data package · llms.txt

Query the daily record in your browser with Datasette Lite, no install needed.

The data is public domain (CC0): it is what the city published, collected here, offered as is with no warranty. Do anything with it. A mention of JailJawn by Stanley Griggs II is appreciated, not required. The code is MIT. If you are a person or a program building on this, llms.txt and the data package describe every file, and CITATION.cff gives a citation.

The latest census as a table

Get each day's count

A feed entry is published for every new census day, usually the morning after. Add either link to a feed reader, or read the newest record directly.

Who made this

JailJawn began at a civic hackathon with the City of Philadelphia in 2013. Everyone who wrote code, opened a pull request, or filed an issue on any of the project's repositories since then, merged or not.

Stanley Griggs II · created the project, the original scraper, and every version since
Maurice Jenkins · Unicode handling and the first README of the scraper, 2015
Kevin Diem · the Node API and most of the 2016 web app; documented the data bug the 2013–2017 import corrects
skyehorbrook · the 2016 web app front end
Lauren Ancona · styles and Open Graph tags for the web app
simon (selichko) · pointed out that earlier data existed, which is why the 2013 chapter is here
Jason Hane · HTML output suggestion
Claude (Anthropic) · pair-programmed the 2026 rewrite, the import, and this site

The original organization's repositories are archived under github.com/ST215 so their history stays reachable. Full list in CONTRIBUTORS.md.