- [Female] The United States Criminal Justice System
and its problems are complicated,
but one problem that's imminently fixable
is the data crisis.
50 states,
18,000 police departments,
16,000 courts and 7,000 prisons and jails,
each collects its own data
resulting in thousands of different databases
and none of them talk to each other.
We can't even answer basic questions
like how many people are in jail?
That has real consequences for the 7 million people
who are incarcerated or on supervision.
To reform a system this complex,
we need to empower thousands of people,
running the criminal justice system with actionable data
to sustainably reduce our prison population.
At Recidiviz, we've created a platform
that stitches together this disconnected data,
and that turned out to be a big deal when COVID-19 hit.
(clap)
- [Male] Perfect. Nailed it.
- [Female] If you're the director of corrections,
and every state has one of these,
and together they run an $80 billion system.
These guys have a huge responsibility,
but they don't have the information they need
to confidently chart a course forward.
And they have very few tools that they can use
to see which of the things they're trying are working.
Whether or not a program is helping 18 to 25 year old men
get out of prison and stay out,
you need to be able to track their journey
both through the program and then after they leave prison
to see what happened in their communities.
The only thing that they get right now,
their infrequent static reports,
like an Excel spreadsheet, full of numbers.
If you think about data,
it's a bit like a map.
Maps were revolutionized
when suddenly everyone had a smartphone in their pocket.
You could walk 50 feet in the wrong direction
and maps would be like,
"I got you.
We're gonna reroute.
We're gonna get you back on course and to your destination."
And that is the way that I like to think
about what we're doing in criminal justice.
It's that technology gives you a way
to know where you are,
to know where you're going,
and to help when you get off track,
give you that nudge that's like, "No, no, no.
Let's get you back on course."
So Recidiviz builds a data layer
that sits on top of these fragmented databases.
Our platform pulls together arrest,
probation, prisons and parole data,
and stitches them into one place,
giving criminal justice decision makers
access to real time information across the system.
(soft music)
So it was always bad that criminal justice decision makers
didn't have access to timely data,
but I think COVID made that much more clear.
For corrections directors,
COVID-19 threatened to not only harm their staff
and the people who were incarcerated, but the community too.
In many ways that's a microcosm of the issue overall,
which is that they have a lot of responsibility,
a lot of decisions to make and very, very bad information.
So we built a model that forecasted COVID's impact
and helped states to maximize for public health
and public safety.
We ended up working with 34 states on their COVID response
and those states ended up safely releasing 25,000 people,
which was three times the rate of states
that didn't use our model.
Most people had less than six months left to serve
for non-violent offenses.
These early releases weren't radical, they were data-driven.
In the wake of COVID-19, every state is facing budget cuts.
They can't sustain the current number of people in prisons,
but if they use data, they can safely reduce populations
and make the system more effective.
The important thing about Recidiviz,
is that it uplevels every other solution
in the criminal justice reform ecosystem.
It's enabling every other solution
to move faster and to flourish and to see if it's working.
Every person that doesn't go back to prison
is a huge success story,
for them personally,
for their families,
for their communities,
for the GDP,
for whatever it is that you care about,
one person not ending up back in prison
is a really big deal.
So if we have this data in all 50 states,
you're talking about radical transformation of the system.
(upbeat music)
- [Male] In our series Catalysts, we're profiling
inspiring social entrepreneurs who are
developing bold solutions to our biggest problems.
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