What if the criminal justice system had a bird’s eye view of itself? What if courts in every county in every state could track over the years what they’re doing right or wrong and correct errors and biases?
Caroline Sarnoff is a criminologist who studies systemic problems found daily in our criminal justice system. She now works at Measures for Justice, and she’s hoping her efforts as the Director of Data Outreach will allow the criminal justice system to take a good, hard look at itself.
“We're having a moment right now in our country,” Sarnoff told "Memory Motel" earlier this year. “Every day there is a new story or a new headline about criminal justice. And if you notice, more and more of them are calling for data. They want statistics. They want to know exactly what's happening. They want to know how many uses of excessive force by NYPD. They want to know how many shootings by cops a year.”
Measures for Justice is the first organization to initiate and implement a series of performance measures to assess the whole criminal justice process from beginning to end — arrest to post-conviction — on a county-by-county basis across the country. Measures for Justice allows all the stakeholders — the victims, judges, prosecutors, police — to see the criminal justice system through its own data in an effort to correct errors and biases.
“Without data there cannot be change,” Sarnoff said. “So our goal is just to collect as much case level data. Every single arrest in a county, every single case outcome over a period of five years. And when you get so much data, you're able to really zoom out and get a nice macro view of what's happening in our criminal justice system on the county level."
"Because justice in our country happens at the county level," Sarnoff continued. "There are a lot of well-intentioned people working in this field. But the stakes are so high and they are so overburdened and under-resourced that the last thing that they have time or energy to do is to analyze their own racial disparity data. Someone else has to help with that. We can't just keep tasking these agencies with this. We can task them with fixing it. You can show someone a problem and then say, OK, it's on you now to fix it.”
This ability for the criminal justice system to see itself through data, to see where it's effective and where it needs to reform, has never been possible before.
“There are counties that have come to us wanting to discuss racial disparity in their policing and charging practices,” Sarnoff said, “and we've been able to show them that it's there. It’s maybe not as bad as they thought it was, or maybe it's worse than they thought it was. There's one county that for the last seven years has been working to eliminate any charging disparity in drug paraphernalia cases. We measured them, and they have zero disparity. As for the state average, you’re 1.8 times more likely if you are non-white to be sentenced to incarceration. So that this county has been able to get their disparity to zero just by knowing about it is really impressive. If you can see what the problem is, you can try and change it.”
To hear the story of what made Caroline Sarnoff understand on personal level the problems inherent in our criminal justice system, listen to “The Bike Incident.”
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