Center Research
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Data Driven Justice and the Progressive Prosecution Agenda:
Trust and Transparency in State Institutions
CoP-PIs Youngmin Yi, Cindy Xiong, Joshua Kaiser, and Jamie Rowen
This research project seeks to answer three sets of questions related to data and decision-making in criminal justice institutions:
1. How do District Attorneys’ efforts to collect, analyze and disseminate administrative data on criminal justice processing relate to broader institutional goals?
2. How can administrative data be harnessed to understand bias and inequality in the criminal justice system and efforts to address them, and what are its limits?
3. How does the public understand data on criminal justice decision-making? How does transparency relate to public trust and perceptions of legitimacy in criminal legal processes?
We answer these questions with a detailed mixed-method analysis of efforts to ensure trust and transparency. With access to administrative data and information from a prosecutor's office, we will analyze and evaluate how prosecutorial decision-making and diversion programs are applied to cases, focusing on identifying individual and case characteristics and contexts associated with prosecutorial decisions and likelihoods of diversion over a five-year period. Through interviews, we will analyze socio-legal processes that produce the administrative data, specifically how social constructs like race and crime are defined in practice. Finally, we will design a user experiment to test the effects of variation in data visualization and presentation of court data on both public trust in the state and effectiveness in transmitting information about prosecutorial proceedings and outcomes and racial inequalities therein to the general public.
1. How do District Attorneys’ efforts to collect, analyze and disseminate administrative data on criminal justice processing relate to broader institutional goals?
2. How can administrative data be harnessed to understand bias and inequality in the criminal justice system and efforts to address them, and what are its limits?
3. How does the public understand data on criminal justice decision-making? How does transparency relate to public trust and perceptions of legitimacy in criminal legal processes?
We answer these questions with a detailed mixed-method analysis of efforts to ensure trust and transparency. With access to administrative data and information from a prosecutor's office, we will analyze and evaluate how prosecutorial decision-making and diversion programs are applied to cases, focusing on identifying individual and case characteristics and contexts associated with prosecutorial decisions and likelihoods of diversion over a five-year period. Through interviews, we will analyze socio-legal processes that produce the administrative data, specifically how social constructs like race and crime are defined in practice. Finally, we will design a user experiment to test the effects of variation in data visualization and presentation of court data on both public trust in the state and effectiveness in transmitting information about prosecutorial proceedings and outcomes and racial inequalities therein to the general public.
