A new online dashboard makes granular data about the Monroe County Jail population more accessible to the public and updates almost in real time.

One of its creators, Monroe County GIS coordinator John Baeten, set the dashboard to aggregate data from questions asked on intake as well as typical jail data such as name and charges.

Baeten said he hopes added transparency will help people address some of the stickier questions about incarceration and crime.

“We can use data to try to drive our understanding of actually what's going on in in reality,” he said.

For example, although there has been speculation online that crime in Bloomington is driven by recent arrivals, as of Monday almost two thirds of prisoners said they had lived in Monroe County for at least three years.

“I feel like it kind of goes against some of the narratives I've heard in town, that a lot of the inmates are folks that have recently gotten here,” Baeten said. “But what the dashboard shows is actually the biggest percentage of inmates are folks that have lived here more than 11 years.”

It could also shed light on problems affecting the jail itself.

The Monroe County Jail has been plagued by maintenance issues and occasional overcrowding for decades, which became the basis for a 2008 class action lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Indiana. Since the county has been unable to select a site for a new jail, keeping the incarcerated population down is a matter of inmate safety.

A comparable share of inmates are being held on felony charges versus less serious misdemeanors and parole violations or out-of-country holding. Around a third said they were homeless, including those who listed their address as Shalom Center or Wheeler Mission.

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The dashboard includes booking data as far back as 1985, including information such as gender, race and time of arrest. Current numbers have been trending upward since a pandemic-era low but remain under peak years such as 2017 and an all-time high in 2001.

Baeten said the dashboard was created over nearly three years through collaboration with workers across the county and Sheriff’s Office.

The county also released a historical elections dashboard last week with information about turnout over the past decade.