Fall 2025 - Data Science Intern, Incarceration and Inequality Project

About the team:

 

The Incarceration and Inequality Project (IIP) combines research, data science, and strategic communications to explore and document how mass incarceration has impoverished communities and widened racial disparities in income and wealth over the past five decades. Vera is creating a national dataset that includes information on incarceration, community supervision, and economic outcomes from a range of local and federal sources. The project team will use this dataset to produce data-informed products, including an online data visualization tool and an interactive data story.

 

About the role:

 

We are seeking a part time Graduate Data Science Intern to join a multidisciplinary team to support the development of data products and analysis that describe the relationship between incarceration and economic inequality. Daily responsibilities include data sourcing, data prep, and data analysis tasks to help progress the team’s mission forward in close collaboration with the IIP team’s senior data scientist.

 

Who You Are:

 

A graduate student in a relevant discipline such as data science, computer science, statistics, economics, public policy, demography, etc. You have technical experience in working with data at scale and have an interest in how large-scale data projects can expose issues that contribute to the systemic inequities of the criminal legal system. You enjoy collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to data analysis and prioritize creating workable solutions in context over building the latest cutting-edge black box machine learning models.

This is a commitment over the Fall 2025 semester with some flexibility as to start and end date.

 

What you'll do:

 

Data Prep

• Identify and process complex datasets in collaboration with the Senior Data Scientist for incorporation into our public and internal analysis datasets. These may span multiple decades and contain data on incarceration, demographics, and socioeconomics across the U.S.
• Transform individual-level monthly data into annual, county-level estimate

 

Data Analysis

• Prepare summaries of data quality and completeness, and create documentation of data processing to inform methodologies and limitations of analyses
• Conduct exploratory data analysis and prepare descriptive statistics of core datasets in collaboration with the Senior Data Scientist to support IIP product development

 

Data Sourcing

• Identify additional sources for longitudinal, national economics data

 

Other support & team tasks, as needed

• Participate in data science and IIP team meetings, and share updates with the tea

What qualifications are we looking for?

 

• Currently enrolled in a graduate program in data science, computer science, statistics, economics, public policy, demography, or a related discipline
• Commitment to using research and analysis to end mass incarceration and undo racism and inequity in the criminal legal system
• Proficiency developing code collaboratively using GitHub

Preferred:

Lived experience as a person directly impacted by the criminal legal system

 

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities you'll bring: 

 

• Experience working with large administrative or survey datasets
• Familiarity with U.S. Census data preferred
• Strong attention to detail and organizational skills
• Experience collecting and processing data using Python or R

 

Technical knowledge we need you to be prepared to use:

 

• Python and/or R
• SQL
• GitHub
• Google Cloud Platform (BigQuery & Google Cloud Storage)
• Command Line

 

Location:

Please note this role will report to our Brooklyn, NY, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, LA, or Los Angeles, CA office. Vera interns and employees adhere to a hybrid schedule and are in-office on an alternating schedule. Full-time positions generally amount to 10 days per month. Part-time positions generally amount to 5 days per month.

Schedule:

The intern should be available to work 15-20 hours per week during the summer. The dates will be between September 8, 2025 and December 12, 2025, with some flexibility to accommodate personal and academic schedules.