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Committee holds data-transparency bill for the Department of Corrections for further review
Summary
Supporters pressed House Bill 525 to require the Department of Public Safety and Corrections to publish downloadable datasets and codebooks; DOC officials said much of the data had been posted piecemeal and the committee chose to hold the bill for a week to allow stakeholder discussions and technical fixes.
Supporters from the Vera Institute of Justice, including Ashley Crawford and Dr. Kim Mosby, urged the committee to pass House Bill 525, which would require the Department of Public Safety and Corrections to publish underlying datasets and codebooks already collected by the agency so researchers, policy-makers and the public can evaluate policy outcomes.
Crawford said the bill does not require new data collection but simply standardizes access to existing information, which she said would reduce the burden of repeated public-record requests and enable evaluation of trends in admissions, releases, supervision and sentence length.
Jonathan Reining, executive counsel for public safety and corrections, told the committee the department had recently posted large amounts of data on its website and that the information requested in the bill was now available; he said the department is not trying to conceal records. Given remaining questions about specific elements and the recent changes to how data are posted, the committee agreed to hold HB 525 for a week to let DOC, researchers and sheriffs coordinate and resolve technical language.
Committee staff confirmed there is no fiscal note for the amendment language under consideration. The bill was not voted out of committee during the hearing and was held to allow additional stakeholder review.
