{
  "id": "1995-march-doing-time-in-miami",
  "slug": "1995-march-doing-time-in-miami",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1995-march-doing-time-in-miami.html",
  "year": 1995,
  "month": "March",
  "monthNum": 3,
  "headline": "Doing Time In Miami",
  "kicker": "Combine crime databases for the big story",
  "author_name": "Gwen Carleton",
  "author_title": "NICAR Staff",
  "affiliation": "NICAR",
  "summary": "The Miami Herald's investigation of Dade County's criminal justice system used 10 different criminal databases to reveal that convicted felons were significantly less likely to go to prison compared to the national average. The project uncovered data inconsistencies and led to reforms including changes to the drug court program and appointment of special judges.",
  "keywords": [
    "databases",
    "sentencing",
    "investigation"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Crime & Justice",
    "Data & Databases",
    "Investigative Methods"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "SAS",
    "Uniform Crime Reports"
  ],
  "full_text": "The Miami Herald's \"Crime and No Punishment\" investigation of Dade County's criminal justice system shows how different databases, used together, become more than the sum of their parts.\n\nTo create the 8-part series, Herald reporters used 10 different criminal databases from local, state and federal agencies, including 14 years' worth of FBI Uniform Crime Reports. The statistics proved what many long suspected: in south Florida, crime pays.\n\nThe reporters found that Dade County, with the highest crime rate in the nation in 1992, sent only 15 of every 100 convicted felons to state prison, three times below the national average. The odds of a Dade robber getting arrested and going to prison were 1 in 40, compared to 1 in 20 elsewhere in America. And when Dade felons did go to state prison, they got significantly less time.\n\nThe Herald's key sources were the Uniform Crime Reports (both electronic and text versions); criminal justice databases from state and federal agencies; reports on various criminal justice topics from federal agencies; and original research, used to obtain conviction rates and prison data for 24 big cities in 13 states.\n\nMixing many different databases added to the project's complexity, according to Steve Doig, the Herald's associate editor/research. Doig discovered that Hialeah, the second largest city in Dade County, has not reported its crimes and arrests for several years. As a result, Dade's real crime rate in 1993 was at least 10 percent higher than that recorded in both the Florida and FBI databases.\n\nDoig also discovered the prosecutor's office had seriously overcounted convictions.\n\n\"Fifty percent fewer going to prison than they were saying,\" Doig said. \"Their computer system was counting cases instead of people, throwing their math off.\" He used SAS statistical software to correct the problem.\n\nHow to report on sentencing raised more problems. How do you compare different judicial circuits? Should a comparison include all criminals, or just some of them? Doig decided to calculate crimes indexes in all Florida circuits, then compare the circuits with the most violent crimes with Dade. That helped screened out the rural circuits with lighter caseloads and notoriously tougher sentences.\n\nThe Herald published \"Crime and No Punishment\" in August, 1994. \"We uncovered real abuses with the drug court program our story shut off the use of for ineligible people,\" Doig said. \"A number of special judges were appointed.\"\n\n\"The most gratifying thing,\" Doig said, \"was, after the initial squeals of dismay from judges, came choruses of 'We didn't know it was that bad - we need to do something.'\"",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1995-march-doing-time-in-miami.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1995-march-doing-time-in-miami.json"
}