Within that John Jay report we released this week is an appendix. This is a list of over 50 projects we looked at when doing our survey. It's got links to the project, their github account, and other quick vitals. Basically, it's a cheatsheet.
I'm going to keep updating the appendix. So, if you've got a project or know of one that's missing, send me an email.
For the last few months, I've been surveying emerging justice technologies with the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Today, we released our report entitled Emerging Technologies and the Need for Evaluation. The aim of the report was to introduce justice stakeholders to the larger trends of government and civic technology, survey a variety of projects from around the country, and finally provide actionable steps to research and evaluate these projects as to improve their impact. A concise summary of where we want this work to go can be found in a piece I wrote for Civicist.
To everyone that had a part in this project, thank you. A little over a year ago, I quit my stable, compensated with money job to evangelize and build new tools that improve the criminal justice system. While there is plenty of work to be done, it is immensely fulfilling to have John Jay support this work and believe, as I do, that it is important.
This project wouldn't have been possible without the forward looking interest (and funding) of Jeff Butts of the Research and Evaluation Center, University President Jeremy Travis, and John Jay General Counsel Marjorie Singer. Further, this report would have been nothing but for the dozens of people that gave up their time to speak to me about their work. Without them and their efforts, there would have been no report.
I hope to have more to share as this vision begins to materialize in the coming weeks and months. For now, it's back to work.
This past week, I was on a panel at the Legal Services Corporation's Technology Innovation Grants conference in San Antonio. The panel included myself, Tanina Rostain of Georgetown Law, Mark O'Brien of Probono.net, and Keith Porcaro of SIMLab. There we discussed the greater ecosystem surrounding the legal tech movement and legal aid. While I intended to use this post as an opportunity to talk about my presentation looking at various expungement app projects and their SEO, my larger takeaway was, in fact, Keith's presentation. It was clean, concise, and on point in a way I've seen few people discuss technology pertaining to legal and social services.
Keith's talk was like coming up for air. As I work on projects and think about implementation issues, I easily get lost in the weeds. Keith's presentation, however, took a needed step back and told a room full of lawyers and technologists that their problem was most likely not technology. Instead, Keith argues, the problem is more likely information architecture or an analogue process. Further, and this is something I've thought a lot about, Keith made a strong point that using technology is not itself a bar to success. I agree. Implementing technology in a way that improves services and makes people's lives better is how we should grade ourselves.
I could continue to fawn over Keith's presentation, but I'll save you. Keith was kind enough to lend me his deck and notes. I've posted them here for your enjoyment. If your browser isn't showing Keith's notes, you can download the file through the hyperlink below.
For the last few months, I've been working on a survey of 50 criminal justice tech and data projects around the U.S. Within this report, the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College and I will be making a series of recommendations to improve the community around and research of nascent justice tech projects. All this being said, Technical.ly just published a sneak peek of this work. It's a quick piece that looks at seven police data projects from around the country. The entire report will be out in a few weeks. Until then, I hope this satiates your insatiable appetite for justice tech.
I'm in the middle of writing a report on new technology and data projects affecting criminal justice systems. Through the help of advocates and experts around the country, I've been keeping a simple spreadsheet of these projects. I've decided to put up a PDF version of this list to start getting feedback. I am building an interactive version, but it's not ready yet. Please give a look, and if you want to share a project or make a comment, please use the form at the bottom of the page.
I just wrote a piece about the new Citizens Police Data Project in Chicago for the American Bar Journal. I wanted to let you know about a couple of other criminal justice projects out of Chicago, which is quickly becoming a hub for criminal justice civic tech projects. If you know of others I missed, let me know. Here are those other projects to be apprised of:
By Smart Chicago and their partners:
Crime and Punishment in Chicago: an index of data sources related to the criminal justice system.
Convicted in Cook: an analysis of five years of Cook County conviction data.
Expunge.io: the original expungement app.
By the Chicago Justice Project and their partners:
Chicago Police Board Information Center: archiving the most serious allegations of misconduct brought against the Chicago Police Department as handled by the Chicago Police Board.
Million Dollar Blocks: data viz showing the concentration of corrections spending by neighborhood.
Being a Millennial and wanting you to read my work, I sometimes write articles in list form. Rarely, however, are listicles the sole thing I publish in any given week. This week is special.
I got an exclusive jump on a new study out of Washington pertaining to their new parole system. You can read that piece on the Huffington Post. The other article looks at 9 public-sector chief data officers to provide broad insight into the players of the in-house open gov/open data movement. That one can be found on technical.ly.
“The German thinker Max Weber said that politics is ‘the slow boring of hard boards and anyone who seeks to do it must risk his own soul.’ It means that change comes in excruciating increments to those who want it. You try to move mountains — it takes a lifetime.”
I hate the word "disrupt." Rather, I hate how it's used.
It's the term that every startup and entrepreneur promises: a quick and complete overthrow of an existing system or practice. We all know the narrative: airbnb disrupts the hotel industry; Uber disrupts taxis; Etsy disrupts needlepoint. The near impossible act of disruption is now unironically ubiquitous.
It's safe to say that the mavens pitching their groundbreaking idea are using this definition of disruption: "to drastically alter or destroy the structure of something". I get the purpose of rhetorical devices and the desire to be hyperbolic in a hyper-competitive environment, but the examples above aren't disruption. Sure, Uber has hurt the taxi industry, but Uber is not the light bulb, vaccines, or the internet; all of which are certifiably disruptive, if not revolutionary.
No matter what car service I use, I still contact a stranger, get into a car I haven't seen before, and take a preexisting road to my final destination. Sure there's no medallions and my phone handles everything, but Uber still has to play by existing rules or go through existing legislative processes to change those rules. They've created greater convenience and a market competitor, but I'm hard pressed to see how they either drastically altered or destroyed the structure of someone driving me somewhere.
It would be one thing if this linguistic zeitgeist only manifested through slide decks in the Bay Area, but that isn't the case. This blustery trope has infested other parts of our society, and I have a specific problem with this language intruding on the criminal justice space. This is a space I would love to see genuinely disrupted, but to say any tool is going to disrupt our criminal justice system is guaranteed to fall short.
For the most part, the criminal justice system will not be disrupted for the mere fact that our system is inoculated against disruption. The legislative and litigation processes, two major levers to criminal justice reform in the U.S., are intentionally slow. The former is structured for reform, not revolution. The latter is not only slow, but for many it is cost-prohibitive. Both can be confusing and aggravating, which create a high, if not impossible, bar to disruption.
Beyond these two structures, the criminal justice system itself isn't the easiest to change either. It isn't a software platform where new features can be easily added and tweaked. Further, even when we find a promising way forward, the standards used to create "best practices" are lumbering. The need for multiple studies and peer review are laborious. Whether we care to justify these hurdles or not, this is why reform is slow to come to criminal justice.
I say all of this, because criminal justice and tech are having a moment, and I don't want this moment to leave a bitter taste because we were promised disruption and only experienced incremental change.
America's criminal justice system has actually disrupted a generation of Americans caught up in tough on crime policies. It has taken us 30 years to collectively open our eyes to the destruction these policies have wrought on our communities. Now, we need to accomplish the impossible and push this tide back out to sea. Dismantling a system with entrenched private industry interests and institutional, bureaucratic momentum is no small feat. Throw the uncertainty of participatory democracy and elected judges on top of this behemoth and you begin to get a sense of the systemic restraints technology will experience in this field.
It might not feel this way, but I write this piece as an optimist. A right-sizing of our criminal justice system is on the horizon. This will be accomplished, and technology will play a large, supporting role. Foremost, technology will provide us better understanding through in-place metrics and real time data collection. Tech can also support system efficiency and an individual's outcome. Allowing the concept of human centered design to seep into our criminal justice psyche will benefit reentry, diversionary, and other programming. Technology can even provide assistance needed to improve our disruption impervious legislative and litigation processes.
Incrementally, these technologies will move the needle towards a fairer and more just criminal justice system. Technology will undoubtedly hasten reform efforts and supplement and bolster these recalcitrant systems. However, it will not disrupt them, and that's OK.