Juvenile Sentence Cost Calculator
CodeSimply calculates and compares different expenditures for juvenile sentences to help attorneys and advocates (Fall 2014)
Technologies used: jQuery (JavaScript library to simplify JavaScript programming), D3.js (JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data), Foundation (to make the web application mobile-responsive)
About the Project
The cost of a sentence has a huge impact on a judge’s ruling and is often used by the advocacy group to expose inefficiencies in the system. However calculating and comparing different expenditures is a tedious and arduous task that many attorneys and advocates simply do not have time for. The organization thus applied to Hack4Impact for help building a juvenile sentence cost calculator
About the Client: Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights
The Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights is a non-profit that defends the right of every Louisiana child to fairness, dignity, and opportunity. It is the only specialized juvenile defense law office in the country and houses the Louisiana Children’s Advocacy Group that advocates for a more fair and compassionate juvenile justice system.
You can find a link to their website here.
Impact
Hopefully the product can make it easier for lawyers and advocates to calculate sentence costs used in defending the rights of children and improving the juvenile justice system.
The Team
Fall 2014 Team members:
Features
Choose sentence type
Choose sentence duration in years, months, and days
Calculate a single sentence in dollars
Add different sentence choices
Visualize comparative sentence costs on scale
See dollar difference between sentence costs
Technical Challenges
The team spent most of the time in the first few weeks determining the features and designing the product. A majority of the planning process was spent discussing how to best display comparisons and make the web application extremely intuitive and quick to use. After a couple of design mockups the client selected the one they liked best and with a couple of modifications the coding started.