Measures for Justice: A New Data Tool For U.S. County Level Justice Statistics

From a Marshall Project Blog Post, “The New Tool That Could Revolutionize How We Measure Justice” by Beth Schwartzapfel:

The enormity of the country’s criminal justice system — 15,000 state and local courts, 18,000 local law enforcement agencies, more than two million prisoners — looks even more daunting when you consider how little we know about what is actually going on in there.
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This week the nonprofit Measures for Justice is launching an online tool meant to shine a high beam into these dark corners. It is gathering numbers from key criminal justice players — prosecutors offices, public defenders, courts, probation departments — in each of America’s more than 3,000 counties. Staffers clean the data, assemble it in an apples-to-apples format, use it to answer a standard set of basic questions, and make the results free and easy to access and understand.
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So far they’ve tackled six states: Washington, Utah, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, gathering most of the numbers one county at a time. Together, these make up 10 percent of the nation’s counties. The team chose those six states for their geographical diversity and — to ease the data gathering in the project’s early phases — because they had unified statewide court databases. The hope is to complete 15 more states by 2020, while updating the statistics from the first six states every two years.

Read the Complete Blog Post (833 words)
Direct to Measures for Justice Data Portal


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