Our take: The Prison Data Explorer (https://tpride.org/projects_prisondata/#home) is a project of Trans Pride Initiative, a Texas nonprofit that corresponds with trans and queer people in prison, mostly in Texas but also in other state and federal systems. The site turns thousands of letters into live, interactive charts that show correspondence over time and the demographics of the people TPI writes to. It also logs reported incidents of violence and mistreatment, each classified with definitions the organization publishes openly. Users can filter the data and search individual records, and companion pages track prison responses to complaints and offer data for PREA auditors. The project shows how a community organization can build its own evidence base to document conditions that official records often leave out.
