How bad data traps people in the US justice system | Clementine Jacoby

- At 17 years old, I found myself in a desperate situation. I had a ski mask that I bought; I had a gun. It was unloaded. I decided to rob a man, and he happened to be an off-duty police officer. I was wrong, and that ultimately just changed my life. - William served 30 years. When he got out he found a good job, started a nonprofit, and volunteers in his community. But he's still on parole and worries every day that he will be sent back to prison. - Parole and probation, as its designed, is a broken system that is a revolving door back into prison. They put me in jail for performing at a nonprofit, spoken-word event that happened to be in a place that served alcohol. And being a devout Muslim, alcohol was not even on my mind. How does that serve society? How does that serve my family? How does that serve me? - Since being out on parole, William’s been sent back to jail three times for minor violations like this. - To this day, I am still on parole. - William is one of millions of people in limbo across the country. But a pilot program in Idaho led by a San Francisco-based tech nonprofit is trying to fix that. If it works, it could dramatically reduce America's prison population. - I'm gonna put you in, and I'd like to at least give us a shot, right? Let's do it. - This is "Catalysts," a show about the changemakers tackling our biggest problems. - You would do corrections, jails, and police. - Exactly. - Got it, okay. - I was working as a product manager at Google, and I had grown up with family members in the criminal justice system, so I had always cared about the issue. And so started exploring criminal justice reform on the side. I wanted to do something that could impact thousands of lives. It's a mistake to only focus on prisons because one in two prison admissions comes from supervision, comes from probation and parole. And so, by focusing on those four and a half million people, we can do a lot. Our job at Recidiviz is to build tools that enable the people who are already succeeding on supervision to get off; to shrink the size of the system and enable parole officers to help the people who need a little bit more support. - During the past several months, the Recidiviz team has been working on the ground with parole officers in the state of Idaho to test a new software they're building. - It's the best state in the country to incubate a solution that can ultimately scale nationally. - I think as a PO, I don't think there's a single PO who can say they're not stressed. - The average PO is supervising potentially north of 80 people at a time. - So the Recidiviz team has been helping us create a better tool that allows us to focus more on the client, spend less time researching information on their case. I got to see that they cared about the PO's opinions, and I got to watch a relationship with the team build. And so Recidiviz's role is to listen to the parole officers who will actually use the tools. In Idaho specifically, there are up to 10 different eligibility requirements that you need to hit in order to be discharged from supervision. But those 10 different requirements sit in potentially 10 different data systems. The parole officer would have to do an enormous amount of work to go and check all of these different and very important things. What we can do with this tool is comb through the data and see statewide who looks eligible for discharge and who are close to it. Give you an alert and lift that up to the particular POs who are working with those clients. - So she goes by Angie, been on supervision for a while. She's been doing so well though. She is focused on her sobriety and her future. She's working to go back to school to become a drug and alcohol rehabilitation specialist so she can assist others through recovery, which I think is just phenomenal. Have you guys been settling in, doing well? - Yeah, yep absolutely. - Very nice. I reviewed your early stuff. I'm putting you in for early discharge. I think that you're actually eligible. But you are actually thriving too, right? You should be proud of yourself, you're doing the- Yeah, pat yourself on the back! - No idea. - Pat yourself on the back. But I wanna put in, the worst thing we're gonna hear is no. And I'd like to at least give us a shot, right? Let's do it. - I went from a broken, heartless junkie to being a mother to my children again. I never thought I'd make it this far. - If they can solve it here, it's a very powerful case study for the country on the role that increasing supervision success can actually play in transforming our communities. - I wrote this back in 1997. Nobody straddles the world of high crimes and maximum security prisons better than a young punk, dumb and full of hum... You see, they make places for the criminal-minded and my brothers, we found it. Tonight, we can repair the breakage, become unified by opening up our chest and chanting the message. This parole and probation system needs all the help that they can get. This is where we can empty our prison system, help relieve the burden of the police department. And that just helps us as a community move forward and gives this person a chance to be productive and successful. - What's happening in Idaho points to a future where the tools that Recidiviz is developing can help streamline and work towards fixing the probation and parole system. It has the potential to help people like William, who are being held back and ready to become productive members of their communities. - Since launching these tools, we've been able to discharge or downgrade almost 5% of Idaho's supervision population. And if we could scale that nationally, that would be a quarter of a million people whose lives and communities and families we’re impacting. - I served my time. So yeah, any day now, I'm waiting to be released from parole. It just makes my heart just ache in anticipation. It's gonna be good. You can count on it.