Data Science Projects for Social Good, Spring 2018, Recidivism

Joseph Colonel(EE ‘15, ME ‘19), Julian Chan(M. Arch ‘18), Julian Mayfield(Art ‘18), Naitan Yang(Arch, ‘19) studied a dataset provided to us by the Center for Employment Opportunities. CEOs mission is to provide immediate, effective and comprehensive employment services to men and women with recent criminal convictions. CEO shared with us a dataset related to the participants in their program as they try to find full-time, post-incarceration employment.

The student group investigated two main aspects of this dataset. First, they analyzed pre and post-incarceration fields of employment, and found a slight trend that participants were able to apply their pre-incarceration skills to post-incarceration work and stay in the same industry.

Addtionally, they studied the commute times of the particpants. While they did not have definitive commuting routes, they utilized the Google Maps API to determing the most probable route a particpant would take using public transportation to get to their post-incarceration workplace. Upon analyzing this data, they found no correlation between commute times and remaining employed at a particular location. Specifically, there was no difference in commute times between participants who stayed in the program, and those who did not complete it.

More details can be found in their final report, and a few of their data visualizations can be seen below.