An innovative tech startup is helping to improve the criminal legal system’s handling of prisons, parole and probation to reduce recidivism and improve community safety, STANFORD magazine reports.
Its software can also alert parole officers when people are eligible for release from supervision or qualify for good-behavior programs.
Thanks to the new tech startup, Recidiviz, this approach is coming to correctional departments across the country in an effort to produce better outcomes, improve rehabilitative treatments and inform policy decisions.
“I was shocked that this system, which touched every community — and sits at the intersection of mental health challenges, addictions, economic mobility, and poverty — didn’t have modern analytics,” said Recidiviz co-founder Clementine Jacoby.
She is a former product manager at Google who helped create the nonprofit Recidiviz in 2018, according to an article in the December 2022 issue of STANFORD, her alma mater’s alumni magazine.
Jacoby started looking for ways to apply modern analytics to criminal justice reform in 2015 under Google’s policy of allowing its employees to pursue socially beneficial projects with 20% of their paid time.
“I was shocked that this system,
Clementine Jacoby
which touched every community
— and sits at the intersection
of mental health challenges,
addictions, economic mobility,
and poverty — didn’t have
modern analytics.”
Recidiviz Co-Founder
Photo courtesy Recidiviz
“I grew up with a dad who is a political scientist and a mom who does addiction counseling,” Jacoby said, describing her interest in the topic. She noted that she has family members who were incarcerated, which has contributed to her belief that “criminal justice reform was the most important public policy issue of our time.”
Recidivism is generally defined as re-arrest, re-conviction, or re-incarceration, usually within three years of a person’s release.
Determining statistics such as accurate recidivism rates proved problematic for Jacoby and her team. They found that the applied definition of recidivism varies widely, as does the quality of data. Such statistics are necessary to allow useful comparisons between programs, counties, prisons, states or categories of incarcerated people.
“One of the key heartbeat metrics for the system was fundamentally incomparable — and that was just the tip of the iceberg,” Jacoby said.
“Collectively, the 50 directors run an $80 billion system. They have hundreds of thousands of staff,” Jacoby said, regarding state corrections departments. “You probably have better analytics on your personal website than these folks get on their flagship programs.”
There is an urgent need to evaluate the effectiveness of rehabilitative and reentry programs and help to prevent re-incarceration, she noted. As proof, citing the statistics that once a person is arrested, the likelihood that they will be arrested again in a nine year window is as high as 83%.
One of Recidiviz’s goals is to help reform advocates understand the likely outcomes of various policies through modeling so they can make informed decisions and more convincing arguments.
“Recidiviz provides these services for free for a lot of nonprofits,” said Molly Gill, vice president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “That’s incredibly valuable. Most criminal-justice nonprofit organizations don’t have the staff or expertise or resources to do this kind of analysis themselves.”
The program’s analytics also improve efficiency for correctional workers. For example, its online platform can create an instant profile of people on parole or probation for corrections staff. “Instead of going through 13 steps, we just have one,” says Joshua Graham, a director of community supervision from Tennessee whose district is responsible for 5,000 formerly incarcerated people.
“It increases safety because it leaves less room for error. It helps us reduce recidivism by giving us an opportunity to actively and efficiently manage the cases that we have,” Graham added.
Parole officers in California are also beginning to benefit from Recidiviz’s analytics.
In a follow-up email interview with SQNews, Jacoby clarified that her organization is working with parole agents and leaders from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“Now, we’re in the process of developing a tool that will surface all the positive milestones and achievements of people on parole,” she wrote. “The tool will give parole agents the information they need to provide positive feedback to their clients, which studies have shown can significantly increase client success.”
Recidiviz provides on-going services to 11 correction departments and offers public-facing dashboards for journalists, researchers and interested community members. According to the STANFORD article, Recidiviz built an open-source database that aggregates, cleans and analyzes public data about criminal legal systems.
Jacoby lauded CDCR for its interest in using advanced analytics to improve the reentry process and she supports continued collaboration.
“Moving forward, we hope to expand our partnership with CDCR … We hope to provide real-time insights to leadership on which policies are working, where resources should be focused, and how CDCR can continue to safely reduce the incarcerated population,” Jacoby wrote.
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Recidiviz used its tools to help 34 states and the federal government identify incarcerated people suitable for medical release or other forms of early parole.
In the STANFORD article, Jacoby commented, “The federal prison system released 11,000 people early during COVID-19, and only 17 committed new crimes, only one of which was violent.” This equates to a recidivism rate of less than 1%.
“These tools probably sound quite basic,” Jacoby said. “But they didn’t exist and in many places still don’t exist.
