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Tracking Data-Driven Outcomes in the Justice System

Tracking Data-Drive Outcomes in the Criminal Justice System

Richmond, VA. – Tracking the criminal justice system, and government transparency in general, is something the United States has grappled with for years. Data transparency, especially in the digital age, is crucial to understanding the work that the criminal justice system does.

Adam Gelb, the Director of the Public Safety Performance Project at The Pew Charitable Trusts, has said that new ways to collect data on the criminal justice system. The first is the composition of the corrections population, including what percentage of the population are a threat to public safety and how many could pay their debt to society in more effective, less expensive, ways.[1] The second is recidivism by risk; “to account for the changing composition of persons under correctional control.”[2]

In 2018, Governor Rick Scott signed into law a piece of legislation making Florida the first state in the country to require all counties to collect and share data relative to courts, jails, policing, and prisons in a single statewide system which is publicly accessible.[3] The law requires the state of Florida to collect roughly 25% more data than previously, and aims to merge this data with local accountability, to hold agencies accountable for abuse, patterns of institutionalized racism, and other structural inequities.[4]

“The problem with criminal-justice records stems from both inadequate access and wild inconsistencies in methodology.”[5] This law aims to fix part of that problem by providing a defined set of terms with definitions for every county in the state to use. This will ensure that data collected in one county or region of the state will be comparable to data pulled in any other area of the state. Once this system is in place, the public will be able to view trends across the state as well as compare different counties in terms of criminal justice data.

Philadelphia implemented a similar measure in October 2019, though only within the city rather than the entire state. Arrest and prosecution numbers in Philadelphia can now be monitored in real time, according to District Attorney Larry Krasner.[6] Krasner was elected in 2017 on a platform of curbing mass incarceration. He said, “Chief prosecutors offices have been black boxes. They didn’t want you to know what was going on, because some of the time, it was going to be embarrassing.”

The Florida legislation appropriated $1,750,000 for database development to connect systems within the entire state; set statewide standards to improve consistency in both data collection and reporting; established common definitions of terms to ensure comparable data; and issues financial incentives to ensure that every county participates.[7] This data will be fully anonymized to protect identities and will track recidivism rates following incarceration as well as daily jail population and prison budgets and staffing levels in order to monitor long-term trends.[8]

This law is part of a larger trend across the United States to make criminal justice data more available and more effective. Chris Sprowls, the Republican state representative who originally introduced the bill, did so because of his time as a prosecutor. He often had trouble locating recidivism data in a given county. “We didn’t have access to the data, because it was in so many different places, it was virtually unusable.”[9]

“It’s a huge win because once it’s fully operational, it will provide a treasure trove of information by which we can measure disparities in the system. This is a monumental undertaking, but it’s critical. You can’t change what you don’t know,” says Carlos Martinez, a public defender for Miami-Dade.[10]

You can read the legislation here: https://trackbill.com/bill/florida-house-bill-7109-criminal-justice-data-transparency/1733516/