“The UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project: Doing Social Justice Work from Inside a Law School”

The title of this post is the title of this article recently posted to SSRN and authored by Sharon Dolovich.  Here is its abstract:

The UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project began in the first weeks of the COVID pandemic as a two-tab, crowd-sourced spreadsheet allowing advocates for the incarcerated nationwide to share information about the impact of COVID in prisons and jails.  Almost overnight, that spreadsheet became the go-to national clearinghouse for all available data on COVID in detention.  By mid-2020, the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was populating its prison COVID tracker with the national facility-level data the Project collected each day — and things only escalated from there.  This Essay tells the story of how a law professor, a clinical teaching fellow, and a large group of students, researchers, and volunteers created a social justice organization driven by legal scholarship, data, and crisis.  The Data Project experience, conveyed here in narrative form, offers several generalizable lessons about institution building in the public interest and the unique value of doing such work in the law school environment.