The W&L Law Library is pleased to announce a new online research guide on World Correctional Institutions in the COVID-19 Pandemic.
In April 2020, W&L Law professor Nora Demleitner asked the Law Library to begin tracking how COVID-19 is affecting correctional institutions around the world. With the UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project already compiling information on U.S. jails and prisons, Prof. Demleitner, a scholar of international and comparative law, sought to expand data collection to foreign countries.
Franklin Runge, Head of User Services at W&L Law Library, and his team of McThenia Research Assistants were up to the task. They developed a site on the LibGuide platform that is freely available to researchers worldwide.
“Our approach is to start small and slowly add countries in which RAs are fluent in the language and can find and comprehend the data,” says Runge. “The goal is to provide an ‘apples to apples’ comparison between countries. That said, some correctional regimes are radically different and data distribution is not uniform.”
As of October 2020, the guide has resource pages for eight countries: Belarus, Colombia, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, and Ukraine. The pages are updated as new data becomes available, and more countries may be added in the future.
The guide is the most recent in the Library’s collection of LibGuides on researching legal subjects, finding and using materials, and conducting legal research. If you have feedback or questions, or a suggestion for a new LibGuide that the Law Library might offer, please email us at LawRef@wlu.edu.