News
Missing: Criminal Justice Data
March 22, 2018
Why don’t we have better criminal justice data? Because justice in this country is primarily local. The United States has over 3,000 counties, and each county has multiple agencies that record data, each in its own way. There is no common language, and there are no standard definitions. Worse, the data is notoriously difficult to get. The result? No one can make informed policy decisions to improve public safety, reduce costs or identify patterns of inequity.
Amy Bach, the founder of Measures for Justice, penned an Op-Ed in the New York Times on why data is the key to identifying and correcting systemic problems in criminal justice systems across the country.