Justice Innovation Lab Is Starting A Blog

At?Justice Innovation Lab?(JIL), our goal is to make the criminal legal system more fair. Starting a blog won’t change that system, but it is an opportunity to share what we’ve learned thus far and to discuss new ideas.

One pressing issue with the criminal justice system — especially with respect to prosecution — is an absence of established best practices — a gap that we are looking to address through partnerships with innovative and influential District Attorney’s (prosecutor) offices. In this space, we hope to create a forum to talk about those ideas as well as JIL’s experiences with them.

This blog will also be an extension of our organizational emphasis on learning. Every week, we designate time for our employees to focus on learning about something — anything — that interests them. Once a week, we come together to share new ideas in the hope that we can build connections with one another and spark creativity in our own work. Similarly, while this blog will focus on criminal justice issues, we’ll be discussing other aspects of our work — the tech stack we use, organizational practices we find helpful, challenges in experimental design, among others — with the goals of sharing with criminal justice partners a range of ideas for change and giving the general public a look at innovation in criminal justice.

Here are some of the upcoming posts you can expect from us:

• As a small, data-focused nonprofit working with sensitive data, we have particular needs for data security and collaboration, so we’ve written a post about why and how we use Microsoft Azure and GitHub.
• While offices may not think of it as experimentation, we believe there is lots of potential for measuring the impact of policy changes in prosecutor offices by thinking of those changes as nudges and setting up the changes in a way that facilitates impact evaluation. We have a post discussing this approach.
• Prosecutor’s offices have not historically used aggregate data for management or transparency, and data quality is often poor at these offices. Justice Innovation Lab has developed a framework for evaluating data quality and has a defined process for working with offices to assess and improve data quality. We’ll be sharing about this framework and process.

We hope these posts and the conversations that follow will be a small contribution to making the criminal justice system more fair and growing the community of people participating in this space.

By: Rory Pulvino, Justice Innovation Lab Director of Analytics

This blog was orignally posted on Medium.