prisonbrief: Downloads and Parses World Prison Brief Data

title: 'prisonbrief: An R package that returns tidy data from the World Prison Brief website' tags: - data - prison - rstats - world prison data authors: - name: Danilo Freire orcid: 0000-0002-4712-6810 affiliation: 1 - name: Robert Myles McDonnell affiliation: 2 affiliations: - name: Department of Political Economy, King's College London index: 1 - name: Avanade index: 2 bibliography: paper.bib date: 1 November 2017

Summary

prisonbrief is an R package that downloads, cleans and returns tidy data [@wickham2014tidy] from the World Prison Brief website [@icpr2017prison]. The World Prison Brief (WPB) is an online database compiled by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research with information on prison systems around the world. WPB data currently cover 223 jurisdictions and have been collected from public sources. The prisonbrief package provides three easy-to-use functions that convert WPB data into a format convenient for statistical analysis. Researchers interested in comparative prison systems -- such as criminologists, sociologists and economists -- can use the output from functions in the package to create maps, plot time series graphs and calculate descriptive statistics with only a few lines of code.