FY 19 Data-Led Governing

The purpose of the FY 2019 Data-led Governing: Raising the Bar for States' Criminal Justice Policy and Practice Program is to provide training and technical assistance necessary to assist states in the development standards for data collection, sharing, linkage, and analysis, as well as help state leaders and the jurisdictions therein to meet those standards and use the resulting data to make resource, policy, and practice decisions. As states strive to set goals for their criminal justice systems and to measure whether they are achieving intended outcomes, this program aims to produce clear recommendations, tools, and resources to improve data collection, linkage, sharing, and analysis.

Funding under this award will be used to facilitate a collaborative process to establish standards for national criminal justice data and develop widespread support for their adoption and use. This funding will also help provide states with technical assistance to operationalize the standards and promote the creation of an open-source data platform that will automatically standardize, analyze, and report data designed to help policymakers inform their decision making. Funding will also enable technical assistance providers, criminal justice experts, as well as professional and criminal justice associations (project partners) work across three phases to accomplish the following: (1) create a set of data standards to inform budget and policy decisions; (2) develop a website that will house a range of tools to help state policymakers and criminal justice practitioners assess current practices and adopt the standards, including a self-assessment tool, planning guides, policy directives, and other materials; and (3) lead a campaign encouraging states to adopt the new data standards, coordinate and provide technical assistance in at least 10 states, and pilot the use of a data platform that incorporates the new standards in at least 3 states.

CA/NCF

Since 2020, the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center has led the Justice Counts (originally Data-led Governing) Initiative; a national initiative designed to help policymakers make better decisions with criminal justice data that is more timely, less disjointed, and as useful as possible. With a team of 21 project partner organizations, we will develop (1) a consensus-driven set of data metrics to inform criminal justice policy and budget decisions in Phase I; (2) a range of tools and resources (to include issue-specific briefs on the Justice Counts metrics, an agency self-assessment tool, planning guides, policy directives, and more), that will help facilitate adoption of the metrics in state and local criminal justice systems in Phase II; and (3) a national campaign to encourage the adoption of the metrics, as well as technical assistance (TA) to help jurisdictions use the metrics to drive decision-making in Phase III.

The national campaign will create a sense of urgency for the project by regularly directing attention to the core issues; highlighting new information, spotlighting state successes, and offering resources related to the campaign; and maintaining pressure on state and local leaders across the country to take action. As a part of that campaign, a public “Justice Counts Challenge” that we will challenges leaders to pursue policy actions or take other steps use to demonstrate their commitment to better criminal justice data. Based on these steps, we will work with BJA to select 10 states to receive intensive technical assistance. We will also continue the campaign and provide “light-touch” TA to agencies in other states that encourages and supports stakeholders in their own data-focused work.

In the 10 states receiving intensives TA, we will work with Recidiviz to develop and implement open-source suite of tools to enable publishing, aggregation, and access to data agencies generate when adopting the Justice Counts metrics that will ensure that metrics are recorded and published in a standardized manner. Recidiviz will also create a Justice Counts national data dashboard that leverages the tools to aggregate and present reported metrics in formats that are intuitive, helpful and actional for policymakers. In these 10 states, we will assess the ability of state agencies to adopt the metrics and provide strategies to overcome any obstacles to implementation. We will work with state-level and local agency leaders to help them use the technology tools or other methods to adopt the metrics.