Can blockchain help solve the Henrietta Lacks problem?
Rediviz has built a platform that connects the various databases, with the goal of identifying people who are already eligible for release but remain behind bars and supervision. “Think of Rediviz as Google Maps,” says Jacoby, who worked on Maps when she was at the tech giant. Google Maps takes data from different sources – satellite images, street maps, local business data – and organizes them into one simple view. “Recidiviz does something similar with criminal justice data,” explains Jacoby, “making it easy to identify people who are eligible to return home or move to less intensive levels of supervision.”
People like Jacoby’s uncle. His experience with incarceration is what inspired her passion for criminal justice reform in the first place.
The problems are big
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world – 2 million people according to the watchdog group, the Prison Policy Initiative – at a cost of $182 billion a year. The numbers could be much lower if not for a number of problems, including inaccurate sentencing calculations, flawed algorithms and parole laws.
Sentencing miscalculations
To determine eligibility for release, the current system requires corrections officers to check 21 different claims across five different databases for each of the 90 to 100 people under their supervision. These manual calculations are prohibitive, says Jacoby, and fall prey to human error.
In addition, Recidiviz found that policies aimed at helping to reduce the prison population do not always work properly. A key example is free of good behavior laws that allow inmates to earn a day off for every 30 days of good behavior. Some states’ computer systems are built to calculate time off as one day per month of good behavior, rather than per day. Over the course of a decade-long sentence, Jacoby says these miscalculations can lead to a large discrepancy in the calculated release data and the actual release date.
Algorithms
Commercial algorithmic risk assessment software systems continue to be widely used in the criminal justice system, although a 2018 study published in The progress of science revealed its limitations. After the study went viral, it took three years for the Justice Department to release a report on its own flawed algorithms used to reduce the federal prison population as part of the 2018 First Step Act. The program, it was determined, overestimated the risks of putting inmates of color into early release programs.
Despite its name, Recidiviz doesn’t build these kinds of algorithms to predict recidivism, or whether someone will commit another crime after being released from prison. Rather, Jacoby says the company’s “descriptive analytics” approach is specifically intended to weed out incarceration disparities and avoid algorithmic pitfalls.
Violation of parole laws
Research shows that 350,000 people a year – about a quarter of the total prison population – are sent back not because they’ve committed another crime, but because they’ve broken a particular probation rule. “Things that wouldn’t send you or I to jail, but would send someone to parole,” like crossing county lines or being in the presence of alcohol when they shouldn’t be, add to the prison population, Jacoby says.
It is personal to the co-founder and CEO
“I grew up with an uncle who went into the prison system,” Jacoby says. As a 19-year-old, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for a non-violent crime. A few months after he was released from prison, he was sent back for a non-violent parole violation.
“For my family, the fact that one in four incarcerations is not driven by a crime, but by someone who has violated a probation and parole rule, was very profound because it happened to my uncle,” Jacoby says. The experience led her to study criminal justice in high school, then college. She continued to delve into how the criminal justice system works as part of her passion project while at Google, a program that allows employees to spend 20 percent of their time on pro-bono work. Two colleagues whose family members had also been stuck in the system joined her.
As part of the project, Jacoby interviewed hundreds of people involved in the criminal justice system. “Those on the right, those on the left, agreed that bad data slowed reform,” she says. Their research brought them to North Dakota where they began to understand the root of the problem. The Department of Corrections makes “big, consequential decisions every day [without] … the data, says Jacoby. In a new yet-to-be-released Recidiviz video, Jacoby recounts her exchange with the state director of corrections who told her, “‘It’s not that we have the data and we just don’t know how to make it public; we don’t have the information you think we have.'”
A mock-up (with fake data) of the types of dashboards and insights that Recidiviz provides to government agencies.
Recidivism
As a software engineer, Jacoby says the comment didn’t make sense to her — until she saw it firsthand. “We spent a lot of time driving around in cars with corrections directors and parole officers watching them use these incredibly burdensome, frankly terrible, old computer systems,” Jacoby says.
As they sifted through thousands of files — some computerized, some paper — they uncovered the consequences of bad data: hundreds of people in prison far past their release dates and thousands more whose release from parole was delayed because of minor paperwork issues. They found individuals stuck on parole because they hadn’t checked one last item off their eligibility list — like simply failing to give the parolee a paycheck. And even when parolees advocated for themselves, the archaic system made it difficult for their parolees to verify their eligibility, so they remained in the system. Jacoby and her team also unpacked specific policies that create racial disparities — like fines and fees.
The solution
Bringing the incomplete, fragmented data onto a 21st century computing platform is more than a trivial technical challenge. It takes months for Recidiviz to sift through state information systems to link databases “with the goal of tracking a person all the way through the journey and finding out what works for 18- to 25-year-old men, what works for new mothers,” explains Jacoby in the video.
Ojmarrh Mitchell, an associate professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, who is not involved with the company, says what Rediviz is doing is “remarkable.” His perspective goes beyond academic analysis. In his pre-academic years, Mitchell was a corrections officer, working within the framework of “well-known but invisible” information-sharing issues that plague criminal justice departments. The flexibility of Rediviz’s approach is what makes it particularly innovative, he says. “They identify the specific gaps in each jurisdiction and tailor a solution for that jurisdiction.”
On the downside, the process used by Recidiviz is “a bit opaque,” Mitchell says, with few details available about how Recidiviz designs its tools and tracks results. By sharing more information about how its actions lead to progress in a given jurisdiction, Recidiviz can help reformers elsewhere identify which programs have the best potential to work well.
The eleven states where Recidiviz works include California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. And a pilot program launched last year in Idaho, if scaled nationally, could reduce the number of people in the criminal justice system by a quarter of a million people, Jacoby says. As part of the pilot, instead of relying on manual calculations, Recidiviz equips managers and correctional officers with useful information with a few clicks on an app that Recidiviz built.
Mitchell is disappointed that Recidiviz is even needed. “This is a problem that government agencies have a responsibility to address,” he says. “But they haven’t.” For a company to come and fill such a large gap is “remarkable.”
