Jail.Guru

Jail.Guru is a web app for jail information and statistics. The jail website is constantly monitored for changes regarding inmate status and it is curated into a search engine and recent arrests page. You can also schedule notifications for when someone is arrested or released from jail, or essentially, who shows up on that list.

Future Plans

While those features are fairly limited, I am currently working on a new version of Jail.Guru, the Jail.Guru Beta. The beta has many features in the works and moves the site away from Wordpress into it's own custom application. Previously, it was mostly hacked together as not a lot of time was spent on it. This time I'm giving it a full redesign.

Planned Features

Some of the features currently in the works are:

1. AI Agent
   1. Ask the agent any question about the Texas Penal Code (now available)
2. Inmate Pages
   1. Texas Penal Code with links to the statute on the state website
   2. Photos and photo history
   3. Arrests and arrest history
   4. Charges for each arrest
   5. Up to date stats, such as birth year / age
   6. News Articles based on the inmate's photo
   7. A quick way to create notifications for the inmate's future arrests or releases
   8. A quick way to generate a character reference letter for the inmate, sign it, and mail it
3. Statistics
4. Revamped Notifications
   1. You can send notifications to yourself, to monitor someone else being arrested or released.
   2. You can send notifications about yourself, to let someone else know you were arrested or released.

Additionally, there will be paid features:

1. More than 3-5 uses of the AI Agent per day.
2. MMS Media Messaging for arrests / releases, letting you receive photos.
3. Character Reference Letter Generator using GPT 4 Turbo instead of just GPT 3.5 Turbo.
4. Notifications based on charges, not people.
5. Webhooks that trigger remote commands when an arrest / release is made, or when a specific charge comes in. (Zapier)
6. Descriptions of charges on inmate pages based on the Texas Penal Code, powered by AI.
7. Advanced AI Agent with full Texas Code search, not just the Penal Code.
8. Natural language querying of our statistics database
9. Ad Free

The Story

I started Jail.Guru for a few reasons, one is because I was arrested (pending indictment 2 years later) and wanted to learn more about the criminal justice system. Another reason is I often hear a lot about the flaws of the criminal justice system, but no one has any statistics in the majority of the counties. Houston has statistics, but they're limited. I personally wanted to know what the crime rates looked like in my area and for the areas in which I travel, including what the top offenses are.

I don't want to stop there though, and plan to combine this data with Activist.Guru and Costs.Guru to provide insight on inflation and the effectiveness of state laws. It will be a while before I am collecting enough data to be able to provide those metrics for the state as a whole.

Expansion

I would guess about 2-3 years and I will have the technology ready to scale out effectively without incurring significant charges. The Llama 3 model seems to be quite powerful and it's available, all I need is the hardware. I suppose I could add the counties one by one, but there are 254 counties in Texas and it takes approximately 4-6 hours per county. I'm working to reduce that with a sleeker framework but it's still a time consuming process. I believe I can get it down to about 1 hour. Still, that's over a month of work at 8 hours a day, when AI could reduce that down to about 12 hours. Given that the average developer would charge $35+ / hour to do the work, it would cost almost $10,000 to get the site fully operational otherwise. With AI, it will cost only the amount of the hardware, which is less than half.

Competition

Competition does exist for Jail.Guru, but from what I have noticed they aren't very good. The search feature doesn't work, the information is outdated, no metrics are provided, or the service is highly expensive. I will be competing for over 400,000 unique website views per month for the state of Texas. That is enough to draw in a steady income and to more than pay for the site.