Data-Driven Justice Reform

Today I want to highlight an innovative project that is working to reframe our country's criminal justice policy through a new examination of hard data - from sentences and recidivism to the impact of crime and imprisonment on "high-stakes" communities. Justice Reinvestment is a project of the Council of State Governments and the group's work is encouraging a paradigm shift in criminal justice - from an incarceration-driven model to one based on a more nuanced view of success.

The group is clear that prison growth has been a costly failure. From its website:

In the past 20 years, state spending on corrections has grown at a rate faster than nearly any other state budget item. Despite increasing corrections expenditures, recidivism rates remain high with half of all persons released from prison returning within three years.

By accepting that mandatory minimums and the growth of prisons have failured at stopping crime and reforming lives while also draining state budgets, this organization is already more forward-looking in its thinking than most government groups. But it's the group's openness to alternatives to incarceration and its goal of quantifying savings through reform to reinvest in high-stakes communities that puts it well ahead of the curve.

The group is funded in part by grants from the Open Society Institute and Pew Charitable Trust - which have both taken a leadership role in bankrolling the next generation of criminal justice thought and policy. It works closely with a leader in this new style of thinking I've featured in this space before - Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center. One of the most revealing maps built by Cadora's organization shows the impact of mass incarceration on low-income inner-city blocks. Cadora calls them "million-dollar blocks" because the government spends a million dollars a year to lock up former residents while the block crumbles.

On a recent episode of PBS' Religion & Ethics, Cadora spoke about Justice Reinvestment and reimagining success in criminal justice reform.

Let us take the investments that had been built up over the years from criminal justice, redirect them to investments in civil institutions in those neighborhoods — better schools, better health care, better mental health support, and so on. In many of the states where the Justice Reinvestment initiative has taken root, prison populations are either dropping or the trend line in growth has been radically reduced, and that’s from Connecticut to Kansas — liberal to conservative.

I hope to hear more from Justice Reinvestment in the months and years ahead, and to see this kind of policy making its way into the work of our state and federal governments.

Photo above: Camilo José Vergara, who has a show through July 12 at the New York Historical Society