This former Google manager wants to solve mass incarceration using big data
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Clementine Jacoby, a former manager at Google, founded Recidiviz to helps prisons reduce incarceration rates using big data.
Jacoby has a lifelong obsession with the prison system after seeing her uncle incarcerated at the age of five.
Activists worry Recidiviz's big data approach may only be helping prisons become more efficient.
Clementine Jacoby, the founder of Recidiviz, a tech-focused criminal legal system reform startup, had her first brush with the prison system at age five. Her uncle was sentenced at age 19 for a nonviolent crime. "He was barely able to be tried as an adult," she says. When he was finally released after about 10 years, he had a very difficult time finding a job or housing. Jacoby says the incident left a deep imprint and a lifelong interest in examining social inequality particularly within the prison system. "Trying to stay out of prison is an incredibly complex thing to do in this country."
This passion would eventually lead her to study a combination of computer and cognitive sciences at Stanford University, "To drive behavioral change at scale," she says. After university, she spent six months volunteering at a gang diversion program in Brazil, but eventually, like many other Stanford graduates, ended up at Google working as a product manager. "Google always emphasized assuming good intent and trusting generalists with a lot of responsibility," Jacoby says.
In early 2017, working off-hours on a shoestring budget and a volunteer staff of tech-workers, Jacoby began Recidiviz. They hoped their combined skills would help revolutionize a prison system whose mainframes were stuck in the 1980s. The nonprofit's mission was to take prison and parole data from each state and make easy-to-view digestible visualizations so that states could determine who qualifies for early release; who is at-risk for COVID; who is eligible for less parole supervision based on their release performance, and more.
Between disaggregated data and parole officers (POs) juggling upwards of 100 cases at a time on low salaries, eligibility and general needs of the systems-involved population have slipped through the cracks. "We want to make it easy for POs to understand what needs exist," Recidiviz engineer Nikhil Bhargava says. Bhargava says Recidiviz also helps parole officers spot the number of parolees having trouble keeping jobs. "We might say 'hey this 10% of people on your caseload have been bouncing around and having trouble with employment, so here are parole friendly employers in your district.'' This is just one example of how Recidiviz corrals varying data within a state — from the number of residents in a facility and their age breakdown to the number of individuals on parole and their performance reports — and reformats it into a uniform and easy to use dashboard. The goal is that those in power— policymakers, parole officers, the DOC — can then use the dashboard to easily identify individuals who are eligible for early release or less supervised parole.
In 2018, Jacoby officially quit her job at Google and established Recidiviz as a nonprofit, convincing developers from Apple, Dropbox, and Facebook to join her. "People with technical skills want to work on problems that matter," she said. Her team echoes these sentiments by underlining how Recidiviz marries data analytics with social good. Of her transition from Metromile, engineer Justine Kunz says she wanted to "utilize [her] time and skills at a company where the primary goal is to fundamentally change people's lives."
According to David Krabbenhoft, the Director of North Dakota's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Recividiz seems to be working and has allowed the NDDOCR to "shift [their] focus from recidivism to positive outcomes, [like] how we as an agency can maximize reentry success." Their tools have been adopted by 34 states and their COVID-tools specifically released 36,000 individuals during the pandemic. The organization has also received bipartisan support from Charles Koch Institute to Ford Foundation and Galaxy Gives; and their policy impact modeling work supports both left-leaning and right leaning advocates from ACLU and REFORM to Americans for Prosperity and Right on Crime.
However, not everybody is convinced of Recidiviz's reformative potential. According to Richie Reseda, a founder of the prison reform organization Success Stories, Recidiviz's approach of reforming Department of Corrections data mainframes is prioritizing the wrong people. "We're not trying to build more efficient systems of incarceration and supervision. If it doesn't change the nature of the agency, it's completely detached," Reseda says.
Similarly, technologist Dominique Harrison, the Director of Technology Policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think-tank in Washington D.C., says that while she considers Recidiviz to be generally a good thing, she is concerned the data the group is working from are constrained by antiquated concepts of criminality. "The issue is that the data [that Recidiviz is working with] is based on actions [like] arrest charges that are racist," she says. Even though Recidiviz is not in the business of data projection or suspicious algorithmic practices— they operate within state's release constraints and merely highlight what individuals qualify based on the data each state hands them — Harrison questions how state data could still perpetuate discriminatory decisions.
Jacoby is aware that the slew of big tech donors and former employees that aren't traditionally involved in prison reform invites skepticism from critics. But she emphasized that Recidiviz prioritizes listening to stakeholders. "We sit in the back of parole officers' cars [and] drive around with them to do house visits; we watch them enter the data after their house visit and see what's hard about it; we see how they spend their days and where their attention goes and how they interact with their bosses; and, ultimately, we try to figure out how we can make that whole system work better."
Jacoby says this skepticism of Recidiviz's data-centric approach means a lot of her job is "explaining how we're staying away from some of those more harmful interventions' ' and that general skepticism around tech is warranted. "It's our job to demystify these technologies so that agencies, communities, and people impacted by the criminal justice system feel ownership," she adds. "Any tech person that says 'it's complicated' is abdicating a big part of their responsibility to the communities they serve." Ultimately, her hope is that the system will continue to challenge itself in the way it operates, and that Recidiviz can play an integral role in that change. "We want to take the best of what worked forward and leave what wasn't working behind."