New tech for prison reform spreads to 11 states
A new non-profit called Recidiviz is using data technology to reduce the size of the U.S. criminal justice system. The bi-coastal company (SF and NYC) is currently working with 11 states to improve their systems and, so far, has helped remove nearly 69,000 people — ones left floundering in jail or on parole when they should have been released.
“The root cause is fragmentation,” says Clementine Jacoby, 31, a software engineer who worked at Google before co-founding Recidiviz in 2019. In the 1970s and 80s, the U.S. built a series of disconnected data systems, and this patchwork is still being used by criminal justice authorities today. It requires parole officers to manually calculate release dates, leading to errors in many cases. “[They] have done everything they need to do to earn their release, but they're still stuck in the system,” Jacoby says.
Recidiviz has built a platform that connects the different databases, with the goal of identifying people who are already qualified for release but remain behind bars or on supervision. “Think of Recidiviz like Google Maps,” says Jacoby, who worked on Maps when she was at the tech giant. Google Maps takes in data from different sources – satellite images, street maps, local business data — and organizes it into one easy view. “Recidiviz does something similar with criminal justice data,” Jacoby explains, “making it easy to identify people eligible to come home or to move to less intensive levels of supervision.”
People like Jacoby’s uncle. His experience with incarceration is what inspired her passion for criminal justice reform in the first place.
The problems are vast
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world — 2 million people according to the watchdog group, Prison Policy Initiative — at a cost of $182 billion a year. The numbers could be a lot lower if not for an array of problems including inaccurate sentencing calculations, flawed algorithms and parole violations laws.
Sentencing miscalculations
To determine eligibility for release, the current system requires corrections officers to check 21 different requirements spread across five different databases for each of the 90 to 100 people under their supervision. These manual calculations are time prohibitive, says Jacoby, and fall victim to human error.
In addition, Recidiviz found that policies aimed at helping to reduce the prison population don’t always work correctly. A key example is time off for good behavior laws that allow inmates to earn one day off for every 30 days of good behavior. Some states' data systems are built to calculate time off as one day per month of good behavior, rather than per day. Over the course of a decade-long sentence, Jacoby says these miscalculations can lead to a huge discrepancy in the calculated release data and the actual release date.
Algorithms
Commercial algorithm-based software systems for risk assessment continue to be widely used in the criminal justice system, even though a 2018 study published in Science Advances exposed their limitations. After the study went viral, it took three years for the Justice Department to issue a report on their own flawed algorithms used to reduce the federal prison population as part of the 2018 First Step Act. The program, it was determined, overestimated the risk of putting inmates of color into early-release programs.
Despite its name, Recidiviz does not build these types of algorithms for predicting recidivism, or whether someone will commit another crime after being released from prison. Rather, Jacoby says the company’s "descriptive analytics” approach is specifically intended to weed out incarceration inequalities and avoid algorithmic pitfalls.
Parole violation laws
Research shows that 350,000 people a year — about a quarter of the total prison population — are sent back not because they’ve committed another crime, but because they’ve broken a specific rule of their probation. “Things that wouldn't send you or I to prison, but would send someone on parole,” such as crossing county lines or being in the presence of alcohol when they shouldn’t be, are inflating the prison population, says Jacoby.
It’s personal for the co-founder and CEO
“I grew up with an uncle who went into the prison system,” Jacoby says. At 19, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for a non-violent crime. A few months after being released from jail, he was sent back for a non-violent parole violation.
“For my family, the fact that one in four prison admissions are driven not by a crime but by someone who's broken a rule on probation and parole was really profound because that happened to my uncle,” Jacoby says. The experience led her to begin studying criminal justice in high school, then college. She continued her dive into how the criminal justice system works as part of her Passion Project while at Google, a program that allows employees to spend 20 percent of their time on pro-bono work. Two colleagues whose family members had also been stuck in the system joined her.
As part of the project, Jacoby interviewed hundreds of people involved in the criminal justice system. “Those on the right, those on the left, agreed that bad data was slowing down reform,” she says. Their research brought them to North Dakota where they began to understand the root of the problem. The corrections department is making “huge, consequential decisions every day [without] … the data,” Jacoby says. In a new video by Recidiviz not yet released, Jacoby recounts her exchange with the state’s director of corrections who told her, “‘It’s not that we have the data and we just don’t know how to make it public; we don’t have the information you think we have.'"
A mock-up (with fake data) of the types of dashboards and insights that Recidiviz provides to state governments.
Recidiviz
As a software engineer, Jacoby says the comment made no sense to her — until she witnessed it first-hand. “We spent a lot of time driving around in cars with corrections directors and parole officers watching them use these incredibly taxing, frankly terrible, old data systems,” Jacoby says.
As they weeded through thousands of files — some computerized, some on paper — they unearthed the consequences of bad data: Hundreds of people in prison well past their release date and thousands more whose release from parole was delayed because of minor paperwork issues. They found individuals stuck in parole because they hadn’t checked one last item off their eligibility list — like simply failing to provide their parole officer with a paystub. And, even when parolees advocated for themselves, the archaic system made it difficult for their parole officers to confirm their eligibility, so they remained in the system. Jacoby and her team also unpacked specific policies that drive racial disparities — such as fines and fees.
The Solution
It’s more than a trivial technical challenge to bring the incomplete, fragmented data onto a 21st century data platform. It takes months for Recidiviz to sift through a state’s information systems to connect databases “with the goal of tracking a person all the way through their journey and find out what’s working for 18- to 25-year-old men, what’s working for new mothers,” explains Jacoby in the video.
TED Talk: How bad data traps people in the U.S. justice system
TED Fellow Clementine Jacoby's TED Talk went live on Jan. 13. It describes how we can fix bad data in the criminal justice system, "bringing thousands of people home, reducing costs and improving public safety along the way."
Clementine Jacoby • TED2022
Ojmarrh Mitchell, an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, who is not involved with the company, says what Recidiviz is doing is “remarkable.” His perspective goes beyond academic analysis. In his pre-academic years, Mitchell was a probation officer, working within the framework of the “well known, but invisible” information sharing issues that plague criminal justice departments. The flexibility of Recidiviz’s approach is what makes it especially innovative, he says. “They identify the specific gaps in each jurisdiction and tailor a solution for that jurisdiction.”
On the downside, the process used by Recidiviz is “a bit opaque,” Mitchell says, with few details available on how Recidiviz designs its tools and tracks outcomes. By sharing more information about how its actions lead to progress in a given jurisdiction, Recidiviz could help reformers in other places figure out which programs have the best potential to work well.
The eleven states in which Recidiviz is working include California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. And a pilot program launched last year in Idaho, if scaled nationally, with could reduce the number of people in the criminal justice system by a quarter of a million people, Jacoby says. As part of the pilot, rather than relying on manual calculations, Recidiviz is equipping leaders and the probation officers with actionable information with a few clicks of an app that Recidiviz built.
Mitchell is disappointed that there’s even the need for Recidiviz. “This is a problem that government agencies have a responsibility to address,” he says. “But they haven’t.” For one company to come along and fill such a large gap is “remarkable.”
Twice a day, morning and night, I use a neti pot to send a warm saltwater solution coursing through one nostril and out the other to flush out debris and pathogens. I started many years ago because of sinus congestion and infections and it has greatly reduced those problems. Along with vaccination when it became available, it seems to have helped with protecting me from developing Covid-19 symptoms despite being of an age and weight that puts me squarely at risk.
Now that supposition of protection has been backed up with evidence from a solidly designed randomized clinical trial. It found that irrigating your sinuses twice a day with a simple saltwater solution can lead to an 8.5-fold reduction in hospitalization from Covid-19. The study is another example of recent research that points to easy and inexpensive ways to help protect yourself and help control the epidemic.
Amy Baxter, the physician researcher behind the study at Augusta University, Medical College of Georgia, began the study in 2020, before a vaccine or monoclonal antibodies became available to counter the virus. She wanted to be able to offer another line of defense for people with limited access to healthcare.
The nasal cavity is the front door that the SARS-CoV-2 virus typically uses to enter the body, latching on to the ACE2 receptors on cells lining those tissue compartments to establish infection. Once the virus replicates here, infection spreads into the lungs and often other parts of the body, including the brain and gut. Some studies have shown that a mouthwash could reduce the viral load, but any effect on disease progression was less clear. Baxter reasoned that reducing the amount of virus in the nose might give the immune system a better chance to react and control that growth before it got out of hand.
She decided to test this approach in patients who had just tested positive for Covid-19, were over 55 years of age, and often had other risk factors for developing serious symptoms. It was the quickest and easiest way to get results. A traditional prevention study would have required many more volunteers, taken a longer period of follow up, and cost money she did not have.
The trial enrolled 79 participants within 24 hours of testing positive for Covid-19, and they agreed to follow the regimen of twice daily nasal irrigation. They were followed for 28 days. One patient was hospitalized; a 1.27% rate compared with 11% in a national sample control group of similar age people who tested positive for Covid-19. Patients who strictly adhered to nasal irrigation had fewer, shorter and less severe symptoms than people in the study who missed some of their saline rinses.
Baxter initially made the results of her clinical trial available as a preprint in the summer of 2021 and was dismayed when many of the comments were from anti-vaxxers who argued this was a reason why you did not need to get vaccinated. That was not her intent.
There are several mechanisms that explain why warm saltwater is so effective. First and most obvious is the physical force of the water that sweeps away debris just as a rainstorm sends trash into a street gutter and down a storm drain. It also lubricates the cilia, small hair-like structures whose job it is to move detritus away from cells for expulsion. Cilia are rich in ACE2 receptors and keeping them moving makes it harder for the virus to latch on to the receptors.
It turns out the saline has a direct effect on the virus itself. SARS-CoV-2 becomes activated when an enzyme called furin snips off part of its molecular structure, which allows the virus to grab on to the ACE2 receptor, but saline inhibits this process. Once inside a cell the virus replicates best in a low salt environment, but nasal cells absorb salt from the irrigation, which further slows viral replication, says Baxter.
Finally, “salt improves the jellification of liquid, it makes better and stickier mucus so that you can get those virus out,” she explains, lamenting, “Nobody cares about snot. I do now.”
She initially made the results of her clinical trial available as a preprint in the summer of 2021 and was dismayed when many of the comments were from anti-vaxxers who argued this was a reason why you did not need to get vaccinated. That was not her intent. Two journals rejected the paper, and Baxter believes getting caught up in the polarizing politics of Covid-19 was an important part of the reason why. She says that editors “didn't want to be associated with something that was being used by anti-vaxxers.” She strongly supports vaccination but realizes that additional and alternative approaches also are needed.
Premeasured packets of saline are inexpensive and can be purchased at any drug store. They are safe to use several times a day. Say you’re vaccinated but were in a situation where you fear you might have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2; an extra irrigation will clear out your sinuses and may reduce the risk of that possible exposure.
Baxter plans no further study in this area. She is returning to her primary research focus, which is pain control and reducing opioid use, but she hopes that others will expand on what she had done.
Podcast: The Friday Five Weekly Roundup in Health Research
The Friday Five covers five stories in research that you may have missed this week. There are plenty of controversies and troubling ethical issues in science – and we get into many of them in our online magazine – but this news roundup focuses on scientific creativity and progress to give you a therapeutic dose of inspiration headed into the weekend.
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Here are the promising studies covered in this week's Friday Five:
- A pill to prevent lung cancer?
- Ancient wisdom about Neti pots could pay off for Covid
- Breakthrough for precision medicine and obesity
- How to refreeze the north and south poles
- The connection between taking multivitamin pills and brain health