The goal of prisonbrief is to download, clean and return data from the
World Prison Brief website. The World
Prison Brief is an online database compiled by the Institute for
Criminal Policy Research with information on
prison systems around the world. Data currently cover 223 jurisdictions
and have been collected from public sources. The prisonbrief package
provides easy-to-use functions to convert WPB data into a format
convenient for statistical analysis.
The stable version of prisonbrief is available on
CRAN. To install it,
just type:
install.packages("prisonbrief")
You can install the most recent development version of prisonbrief
using the remotes package. First, you need to install the remotes
package with the following code:
if(!require(remotes)) install.packages("remotes")
Then you can install prisonbrief from its GitHub
repository:
remotes::install_github("danilofreire/prisonbrief")
If you are using Linux, you may need to type the following command
before installing prisonbrief:
sudo apt-get install libudunits2-dev
prisonbrief relies on some spatial-data packages in order to return
data as simple features dataframes. You may need to install packages
such as rgeos if you do not already have them installed.
prisonbrief is quite simple to use. The package contains only three
functions, all of them starting with wpb, a mnemonic for World Prison
Brief.
The first is a convenience function named wpb_list(). It prints a list
of available countries to the console.
library(prisonbrief)
#> Warning: package 'prisonbrief' was built under R version 4.0.2
wpb_list()
#> # A tibble: 226 x 2
#> country_name country_url
#> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 Afghanistan afghanistan
#> 2 Albania albania
#> 3 Algeria algeria
#> 4 American Samoa (USA) american-samoa-usa
#> 5 Andorra andorra
#> 6 Angola angola
#> 7 Anguilla (United Kingdom) anguilla-united-kingdom
#> 8 Antigua and Barbuda antigua-and-barbuda
#> 9 Argentina argentina
#> 10 Armenia armenia
#> # … with 216 more rows
The second function is wpb_table(). This function returns a series of
variables about the prison systems of the world, of a particular region,
or of a specific country. For instance, the code below downloads prison
data for Africa:
africa <- wpb_table(region = "Africa")
#> Warning: Prefixing `UQ()` with the rlang namespace is deprecated as of rlang 0.3.0.
#> Please use the non-prefixed form or `!!` instead.
#>
#> # Bad:
#> rlang::expr(mean(rlang::UQ(var) * 100))
#>
#> # Ok:
#> rlang::expr(mean(UQ(var) * 100))
#>
#> # Good:
#> rlang::expr(mean(!!var * 100))
#>
#> This warning is displayed once per session.
names(africa)
#> [1] "country" "prison_population_rate"
#> [3] "prison-population-total" "female-prisoners"
#> [5] "pre-trial-detainees" "foreign-prisoners"
#> [7] "occupancy-level" "iso_a2"
#> [9] "name" "geometry"
The region choices are “Africa”, “Asia”, “Caribbean”, “Central America”, “Europe”, “Middle East”, “North America”, “Oceania”, “South America” and “All”.
wpb_table() also provides geometric shapes for maps. For instance, you
can download and plot the prison population rate in South America with
only a few lines of code:
south_america <- wpb_table(region = "South America")
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(south_america, aes(fill = prison_population_rate)) +
geom_sf() +
scale_fill_distiller(palette = "YlOrRd", trans = "reverse") +
theme_minimal()
The function can also be used to retrieve data for a single country. The data returned are parsed from the single country tables, however, and are not ready for quantitative analysis without further cleaning (removing parentheses etc.). Since some of this information may be relevant, we have chosen to leave it in. Data from regions instead of a single country are fully prepared for automated analysis.
Finally, we have added the wpb_series() function to the package. The
function downloads and tidies the tables describing the trends in the
prison population total and the prison population rate for every
jurisdiction included in the project. Below is an example taken from
Germany’s country
profile:
You can retrieve the same information with the following code:
germany <- wpb_series(country = "Germany")
germany
#> Country Year Prison population total Prison population rate
#> 1 germany 2000 70252 85
#> 2 germany 2002 70977 86
#> 3 germany 2004 79452 96
#> 4 germany 2006 76629 93
#> 5 germany 2008 72259 88
#> 6 germany 2010 69385 85
#> 7 germany 2012 65889 82
#> 8 germany 2014 61872 76
#> 9 germany 2016 62865 76
#> 10 germany 2018 63643 77
wpb_series() can also be combined with wpb_list() to make
interesting time series graphs. The code below downloads data for all
countries then plots the prison population rate for Brazil, Germany,
Russia and the United States:
library(dplyr)
x <- list()
countries <- wpb_list()
for(i in 1:nrow(countries)){
y <- try(wpb_series(country = countries$country_url[i]), silent = FALSE)
if(class(y) != 'try-error'){
x[[i]] <- y
} else{
next
}
}
X <- data.table::rbindlist(x, fill = TRUE) %>%
dplyr::full_join(countries, by = c("Country" = "country_url"))
X %>% dplyr::filter(country_name %in% c("Brazil",
"Germany",
"Russian Federation",
"United States of America")) %>%
ggplot(aes(x = Year, y = `Prison population rate`,
group = country_name, colour = country_name)) +
geom_line() +
theme_minimal()
prisonbrief was written by Danilo
Freire and Robert Myles
McDonnell. Feedback and comments
are most welcome. If you have any suggestions on how to improve this
package feel free to open an issue on
GitHub.
You can cite the prisonbrief package with:
citation("prisonbrief")
#>
#> To cite 'prisonbrief' in publications, please use:
#>
#> Danilo Freire and Robert Myles McDonnell (2017). prisonbrief:
#> Downloads and Parses World Prison Brief Data. R package version
#> 0.1.0. URL: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=prisonbrief
#>
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#>
#> @Manual{,
#> title = {{prisonbrief}: Downloads and Parses World Prison Brief Data},
#> author = {Danilo Freire and Robert Myles McDonnell},
#> note = {R package version 0.1.0},
#> year = {2017},
#> url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=prisonbrief},
#> }
Please also cite the source as World Prison Brief, Institute for Criminal Policy Research.