“In the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context.” — Louis Rossetto (1993)

The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world. In a nutshell, Recidiviz aims to prevent avoidable prison admissions, accelerate earned release, and reduce harmful disparities.

One of the many reasons for this issue is the lack of clean data. Policies exist to create a more rehabilitative system, but without meaningful data in the hands of decision makers, those policies can’t reach their intended impact.

Our work stitches together information from across different regions to uncover what policies and practices are having good outcomes on people. We then equip government staff to make better decisions by building products that fit into their day-to-day lives.

As a nonprofit company, Recidiviz has valued openness as a cultural pillar since day one. Our code base is open source so that anyone can study or extend it to further their own criminal justice reform work. We welcome questions and contributions on Github.

"We shape our tools, thereafter our tools shape us" — John Culkin (1965)

Mass incarceration is entangled with socioeconomic and techno-political complexities that data alone cannot fix. The design team organizes around three major areas of work:

• Safely accelerating people out of the system

• Building the public data foundation for a smaller system

• Supporting the passage of decarceral legislation

The key is finding the smallest nudge for the biggest effect.

Using human–centered practices to shape a safer and more equitable society is intrinsically rewarding. But, it is also important to hold ourselves accountable. After our first 4 years, our collective effort played a role in improving the living conditions of over 100k people navigating their way out of the criminal justice system.

“Any observant local knows more than any visiting scientist. Always. No exceptions.” — Roger Payne (1996)

Our process is collaborative and iterative to ensure that we are adapting our products to the real needs of both government staff and regular citizens.

The steps might look something like this:

• Bring data from fragmented government databases into one place

• Identify pain points and areas of opportunity for building a safer, smaller, more effective system

• Design tools that address day-to-day needs of justice-impacted people

• Validate accuracy of the proposed solution

• Measure the outcomes against goals to ensure effectiveness

• Iterate based on user feedback and impact metrics

Recidiviz is home to a passionate group of designers, data scientists, and engineers, that bring a diverse set of backgrounds to the criminal justice space. From behavioral economics to journalism, collaboration informs every decision we make.

We currently have ~6 people focused on research and design. Only some of us are listed on read.cv.

You can always check out our website or reach out to Juan directly.
juan@recidiviz.org