Reaching Incarcerated People in Jail: the Case of PrisonPandemic

Research, advocacy, and archival projects related to incarceration often lack knowledge about the ongoing conditions of carceral facilities, and myriad challenges prevent stakeholders from successfully conducting outreach with incarcerated people. Using a case study of archival materials contributed to PrisonPandemic, wherein letters and phone calls were invited and accepted from people incarcerated in California during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, the authors demonstrate a novel outreach method using web scraping and postal mailing. They analyze PrisonPandemic’s outreach, rejection rates, and response rates to 20 county jail systems from October to December 2021. The authors find that scraping and mailing help overcome typical challenges associated with conducting outreach with this population. Scraping and mailing can create a comprehensive sampling frame to achieve response rates comparable with that of traditional outreach methods to nonincarcerated populations. The authors discuss applications beyond pandemic periods and incarcerated populations, as well as the benefits, challenges, and ethical implications of using scraping and mailing.