A few days ago, a leading Marathi newspaper carried a story regarding the over-utilization of jails in Maharashtra. The numbers were shocking to say the least. However, the use of graphics to explain those numbers was absolutely wrong. In this post, we will see the original charts and the confusion caused in them, and how the data could have been presented to be more useful to a reader.

This is the snippet from the said news.

The type of chart used in the news is called ‘pie’ charts, simply because it resembles the round shape of a pie. This chart is especially useful when you want to show parts of a data. For example, out of 75 students, 30 are males and 45 are females. Out of 24 hours a day, an average human spends 8 hours sleeping, 1 hour eating and so on. This gives an idea of how an existing ‘pie’ or data is distributed into further parts.

The use of pie charts in the news is plain incorrect. The goal is to highlight the over utilization of the district central jails and the state-wide jails, for which a simple bar chart is more useful.

The second chart shows the split of male and female prisoners further. I doubt the use of this segregation further, but if we want to use it, then now will be the best time to use a pie chart.

The last table shows the capacities of the nine district central jails, and the over or under utilization of the capacity. If a jail has 500 excess prisoners, vs other has 200 excess prisoners, which is worse off? What if the capacity of first jail is 5000, and for the second jail it is 200? Then the first jail is only 10% over utilized, whereas the second jail is 100% over utilized.

In this chart, we will see the capacity of each jail, and the current over or under utilization.

It is very clear that the condition of few of the jails is worse than others. Can we present this data in a better format.

Consider a cell where a jail holds 10 prisoners normally. This is the condition of the cell in each of the jails.

The jails of Mumbai, Thane and Aurangabad are housing almost three times more prisoners in the limited space, creating a serious of issue of humanity as well as potential risk. Even if the prisoners are moved to other jails that have space (such as Taloja), the situation is dire.