The Case For Data-Driven Justice

Crime-tracking and mapping software like CompStat has changed policing. So when will the data revolution reach our courts?

In an excellent New York Times op-ed, Amy Bach writes that while we use sophisticated statistics to assess schools and hospitals and set overall public policy, our courts are still stuck in the Stone Age. They operate as the legal equivalents of obsolete, wood-paneled vacuums — missing countless chances to learn from the successes and failures of other courts. And it doesn't need to be this way.

To change the system, Bach (author of Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court) proposes creating a "justice index" to measure local courts on issues like cost, recidivism, crime reduction and collateral consequences, including whether people lose their jobs or homes after contact with the criminal justice system.

It's a brilliant idea, and I hope courts and policy-makers are listening. Courts are meant to protect the public, and that means they should be helping to reduce crime and improving peoples' lives. Instead, we've come to expect that our court system exists as a dense bureaucracy riddled with inequalities and endless delays.

The good news is that isolated courts exist there are that are experimenting and improving results through data analysis. Hawaii Judge Steven Alm, for example, looked at the data of cases before him and found that short, certain sentences actually prevent crime and make probation more effective. Likewise, UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman expands on this theme, offering more data in his book When Brute Force Fails. Bach makes the case for a nationwide data project — starting with the country's 25 biggest counties — so that we can concretely establish what types of probation are more effective and learn from counties that have actually succeeded in reducing cost and crime.

To be sure, at this point, the justice system is so thoroughly broken that any kind of substantive data analysis is seriously threatening. However, there's some real momentum behind the issue — particularly in light of the fact that the U.S. House has voted to support the National Criminal Justice Commission (which is now waiting for Senate approval). Data-driven justice is a great goal, but it the meantime, it needs people like you and me behind it.

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