CSGJC providing TTA to supervision and reentry agencies to improve evidence-based service and support provision, track outcomes, and use data and technology to improve reentry and supervision outcomes

The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center requests $7,000,000 from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) to develop technology solutions and action plans to guide grantees as they implement or expand initiatives that will improve reentry and/or supervision outcomes using a data-driven approach. Our project will position grantees to use data to identify disparate outcomes and access to services for people of color and other historically underserved and marginalized groups and to develop approaches to remedy these disparities.

The CSG Justice Center will provide comprehensive and tailored training and technical assistance (TTA) to Smart Reentry and Supervision grant recipients to ensure state- and local-level corrections agencies have the knowledge and tools necessary to increase the success of people returning to and supervised in their communities. We will help agencies assess their capacity to meet their grant goals and increase their capacity to use data to improve supervision and reentry outcomes. We will support their adoption of evidence-based practices (EBPs), new technology tools, and additional promising methods to enact positive change in their jurisdictions. Through targeted TTA, agencies will implement their action plans and work with our partner, Recidiviz, to develop technology tools that will facilitate and support the implementation of their action plans. With Recidiviz, we will test the technology tools to find areas of improvement and bring program enhancements to scale while pursuing continuous quality improvements for each grantee. Lastly, we will promote collaboration among agencies and officials in grantee jurisdictions. An advisory panel of outside experts will advise on our evaluation of the grantees, and the CSG Justice Center will share project results with the field at large to encourage similar practices.
We are uniquely qualified to lead this project as we have expertise in EBPs in community supervision and reentry and served as the TTA provider for over 1,500 BJA grantees. We will draw heavily on our previous work with Recidiviz on the Lantern project, in which we developed new technology tools and data dashboards for departments of corrections (DOC) that provided near real-time data on violations and revocations. We also offered extensive coaching to help DOCs to use data understand what is driving revocations and to inform changes to practice and policy. We will also work with the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) and subject matter experts (SMEs) to provide TTA to grantees, and an outside advisory panel will advise on grantee program evaluations.