Criminal Justice

HB 525 requires Louisiana's Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPS&C) to publish specific correctional data online in downloadable formats (Excel and CSV) by October 2026. It mandates monthly publication of offender census data from parish and state facilities, demographic dashboards tracking prison populations, admission/release trends, and death data, along with supporting codebooks explaining data definitions and methodologies. The bill directly affects DPS&C (which must implement these changes) and the public (which gains access to anonymized, machine-readable data). Key provisions include requiring comparable data formats across facilities, maintaining an online dataset index, and submitting compliance reports to legislative committees by 2027. The law explicitly protects personally identifiable information through redaction while maximizing public access to aggregate data.