Recidiviz

Recidiviz is a tech nonprofit working to reduce incarceration safely and equitably. Their platform stitches together fragmented data, powering real-time insights that help criminal justice decision-makers reduce prison admissions, reduce length-of-stay, and track what’s working. Recidiviz’s platform now covers 12 states and 26% of the U.S. prison population. Recidiviz has helped remove 75K people from the criminal justice system to date.

The Problem
The U.S. comprises less than 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of its incarcerated population. Communities of color are disproportionately swept up. One in 87 working-aged white men is currently behind bars, and that number is one in 12 for Black men, half of whom are arrested before the age of 23. The effects are lifelong, with over 80% of those released being rearrested within 10 years. They are also intergenerational — a child becomes 6x more likely to enter the system once a parent does. In short, the system has become a revolving door that millions of people enter when young and can never leave. And with nearly half of the new prison admissions stemming from parole or probation violations, this vicious cycle remains unbroken. Forty years on, mass incarceration has not reduced crime, and it costs $182B per year. Bipartisan calls for reform are a decade old, but the door still turns because there is no single, centralized system to reform and concentrate efforts. The U.S. splinters its justice system across 50 states and 3,000 counties, creating a distributed problem with scattered data and no feedback loops.

The Solution
Recidiviz partners directly with state criminal justice agencies to bring corrections data into their open-source data platform and use it to power tools that help decision-makers — from leaders to individual probation and parole officers — take steps that measurably reduce incarceration. In each state, Recidiviz follows their evidence-based model:

1. Batch processing data to identify people who do not need to be in the criminal justice system at all.
2. Identifying the drivers of disparities and incarceration at every step in the system.
3. Launching tools that highlight people who are succeeding and auto-filling forms to get them released.
4. Using their data platform to power public dashboards, open source code, and policy impact analyses for the ecosystem.

Recidiviz’s team brings tech expertise, domain expertise, and lived experience to drive decarceration at scale. Their tools are build-once-deploy-everywhere — with their platform, something that works in one state, can quickly scale to all states on the platform. Recidiviz is funded through state contracts and philanthropy. State contracts ensure that agencies have skin in the game. Philanthropy enables Recidiviz to get started quickly (it takes 12 to 24 months to secure state contracts) and begin generating impact right away.