Through our growing base of supporters, and by developing our website as an online resource for those in justice services, we’re beginning to have a global impact. The maps below show some of the recent visitors to the website. Click any map for a larger view.

This national and global recognition helps bring positive attention to the proactive and preventative approaches we’re taking here in Iowa City and Johnson County. It’s how our County has come to have one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world (and falling). [source]

Other communities are interested to learn how investing in education social services up stream can save millions of dollars down stream in averted law enforcement, corrections, and incarceration costs.

At a time when the Justice Department and other government agencies are looking for ways to reduce incarceration, people are looking to communities like Johnson County who have a demonstrated track record of having one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.

Thanks to everyone who is making a difference!

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Responding to Criticism – Q&A

It’s come to our attention that a few misinformed or intensionally malicious people have been making false accusations about the above maps, presumably in an attempt to discredit this article and this website. So, the following Q&A has been created to address the various false accusations that are being maliciously spread:

• Could the visits to the website that are from outside Johnson County be search engine web crawlers and not real people? A few people critical of the above report are stating that the perceived interest in our website is not actual people visiting the site, but search engine crawlers. This simply isn’t true. Analytics tools are able to discern what is a real visitor and what is a crawler or bot. They identify and label crawler activity. Those making false claims about the above report are either ignorant of how website analytics works or they are intentionally trying to discredit the report. It’s fairly easy to verify this by simply checking each visitor’s stats. For example, a site visitor identified as “Facebook Bot” from Menlo Park, California visiting every page on the site isn’t a real person. Another example is a “visitor” identified as “Yahoo” from Sunnyvale, California. Typically, a dozen bots aren’t sufficient to throw off the stats for a site that gets thousands of visits. We’ve had only about a half-dozen bots visit the site, and they were from the U.S. only.
• Is this an attempt to suggest global support of the Justice Center proposal? It’s been suggested that the above report is an attempt to “create an air of inevitability” regarding the Justice Center proposal. Considering that the Justice Center (in its previous versions) has been defeated twice, and no proposal currently exists, it’s fair to say that this is not an attempt to suggest there is global support for our failed bond issue. Indeed, anyone outside of Johnson County is irrelevant when it comes to any local election.
• Is this an attempt to invoke peer pressure? It’s been suggested that the above report is an attempt “garner support from peer pressure.” It’s unlikely that a resident of Johnson County will feel any peer pressure from someone half-way around the world. Indeed, just because a person utilizes one of the many pages on this website as a resource or reference doesn’t mean they are in favor of an old twice failed bond issue (that no longer exists).
• Isn’t this disingenuous web traffic data? It’s been suggested that the website traffic above is misleading. We know that the maps above aren’t skewed by excess crawlers, image-only traffic, or momentary Stumbleupon visits. The website traffic above is probably 99% the result of real visitors to the site, and perhaps 1 out of 100 are a web crawler. So, no, the report is not misleading.
• Why would someone half-way around the world be interested in this website? Many of the articles and stories posted to the site are about justice reform in general and will be of interest to just about anyone working in justice reform. Furthermore, the articles on this site are being promoted using multiple websites and social networks to a known global readership interested in these issues.

Website stats and analytics tools (such as QuantCast, Google Analytics, or Statcounter) have been used for many years by thousands of website owners to determine the interest level that people have in their website content. It’s fair to say that website traffic is one of the primary metrics used to evaluate a website. You can learn more by reading the Wikipedia article on website analytics.