YASP Counter

There are young people (juveniles, under the age of 18) locked up in adult prison in Philadelphia. This suite keeps a count of them for the Youth Art and Self-Empowerment Project (YASP).

Certain aspects of the tool are over-engineered for a simple counter. A secondary goal of the project has been to practice using more advanced libraries and techniques.

Sources

There is historical data collected from the JailJawn Code for Philly project. Ongoing updates are collected directly from the Philadelphia prison system's daily census.

API

The counter provides a simple JSON API for retrieving data. Individual counts take the form:

{
    "date": "yyyy-mm-dd",
    "juvenile_female": integer,
    "juvenile_male": integer,
    "total": integer
}

API endpoints are as follows:

• api/census: returns an array of all the available counts
• api/census/latest: returns the most recently available count
• api/census/[date]: [date] must be a valid date for which a census has been taken. Returns the count for the provided date, or an error.

Configuration notes

Export CENSUS_DB to a SQLAlchemy database url, such as

   export CENSUS_DB=postgresql://readonly_user:password@example.com/real

or

   export CENSUS_DB=sqlite3:////$HOME/dir/census.db

Prepare the database tables with an interactive shell:

census.db_tools.create()

Capture the latest census data:

scrapy crawl census_page