Socioeconomic Drivers of Adult Disproportionate Minority Contact; Measuring Disproportionate Contact in Charlottesville–Albemarle: A Unified Data Pipeline and System Model 3 views

Disproportionate contact in the criminal justice system is a complex issue shaped by the interaction of race, economic conditions, and how the system itself operates. In the Charlottesville and Albemarle region, differences in who comes into contact with the system are not random but are concentrated in certain communities. This research looks at the broader problem of how these differences are created and measured. It shows that disparities are not only about individual actions but are also influenced by how the system defines and tracks contact. Both the technical project and the STS research focus on this shared problem by studying how economic conditions, data decisions, and institutional practices work together to shape outcomes. The technical project builds a data system that connects jail booking records with neighborhood level Census data. It uses over 59,000 records from the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail and links them to census tracts using address matching and geocoding. This allowed for analysis of how crime and system contact vary across different communities. Methods such as clustering, principal component analysis, and regression were used to find patterns in the data. The results show that Black individuals are overrepresented in most areas, but the level of this overrepresentation changes depending on economic conditions. In areas with higher poverty, the disparity is much stronger, while in wealthier areas it becomes smaller or even reverses. This shows that economic conditions play a major role in shaping who comes into contact with the system. The STS research paper explains why these patterns appear by focusing on how the system is designed. It argues that disparities are not just discovered through data, but are partly created by the choices made when collecting and analyzing that data . This includes decisions about how populations are measured, how data is linked together, and how different steps in the justice process are handled. Using ideas from science and technology studies, the paper shows that data systems and social systems shape each other. It also explains how decisions made by police officers, jail staff, and other workers can affect outcomes at each step. By understanding disparity as something shaped by both data and human decisions, the research points to ways the system can be improved, such as better measurement methods, clearer data practices, and changes to how decisions are made within the system.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

Disproportionate; Contact; Tract; Cluster Analysis

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering Technical Advisor: Michael Smith, Peter Alonzi, Preston White STS Advisor: Coleen Carrigan Technical Team Members: Saiesha Gohil, Mitchel Palmer, Ryan Yates, Kevin Villalobos

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-05-08