Our Project
The COVID-19 in California Prisons Project aims to explore questions linked to the experience of medical, economic, and social racial inequities amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. The project focuses on incarcerated people and their loved ones to emphasize prisons as major loci of racial inequity in the United States (Lofaro and McCue 2020). The project pairs interactive digital maps built from data released weekly by the Los Angeles Times and narrative informed by: news articles concerning labor abuses during the pandemic and reform attempts from before the pandemic (Christiansen and Winton 2020, Feldman 2020, Levin 2020); demographic information of people incarcerated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (Harris et al 2019); and academic articles about the (mis)handling of the pandemic in the American jail system to (Okano and Blower 2020). Results of pairing the mapping of quantitative data and the distillation of qualitative data into visuals and text ground an abstract story of large, sometimes incomprehensible numbers within a context of marginalized people’s microcosmic experiences of injustice, suffering, hope, and resistance. Ultimately, the project aims to record, in whatever small way, human stories during brutally unprecedented times.
Website Accessibility & User Interface
Color Blind Conscious
Screen Reader Friendly
No Audio-Based Media
Our Team
Eddie Cleofe
Project Manager
Eddie Cleofe is a second year PhD student at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. His research explores indigenous responses to early Spanish colonialism and emergent capitalism in the Philippines. As Project Manager and Data Specialist, Eddie’s responsibilities included organizing team meetings, creating the animated map and data visualization, and drafting the project’s abstract.
Ivana Dama
Web Specialist
Ivana studies Design Media Arts at UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture. Her work explores the infusion of technology with traditional art practices. Working as the web specialist on this project, she designed and developed the website including the information architecture and content strategy preliminary frameworks. Her responsibilities included website organization, wireframes, and design of the visual content. Ivana made sure that all the graphics and images used on the website meet accessibility standards.
Jasdy Perillo
Content Specialist
Jasdy is a fourth-year Communication Studies major and Digital Humanities minor. She is responsible for designing the “COVID-19 in CA Prison Facilities” map. As the content specialist, she worked to make the project narrative both compelling and informational for all audiences, as well as on the data critique to shed light on the absence of much needed data on the prison population.
Mihir Arya
Data Specialist
Mihir is a third-year Mathematics of Computation major and Digital Humanities minor. He is primarily responsible for cleaning and aggregating the dataset which this project is premised on, which is sourced from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He has also worked on the data critique to highlight the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of this dataset.
