Institute Intelligence, January 2025: Launching the Prosecution Data Collaborative, Uncovering Jail Trends
By Carla Sinclair, Senior Communications Associate
Welcome to the first Institute Intelligence of 2025. We know the start of the year has been a busy, and possibly tumultuous, time for many of our partners in government, nonprofits, and other public sector institutions. Here at ISLG, we're ready—as always—to support our partners in their work, whether through data-driven insights, capacity building, or strategic planning. See below on how we're doing this already, as well as some new partnership opportunities.
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Optimizing Governments & Institutions
Launching the Prosecutorial Data Collaborative – Work with Us!
In communities of all political shades and geographical sizes, state and local prosecutor’s offices have a considerable amount of discretion when it comes to who is charged and will move deeper into the system. These decisions can be shaped by a number of factors, with community safety primary among them. To measure and assess the outcomes of their decision-making, many prosecutors’ offices have starting using data to problem-solve and create policies and practices that will best help them achieve their goals.
Making change at the point of prosecution requires commitment from prosecutorial leaders to examine their policies, practices, and operations. This commitment leads to safer and more effective, efficient, and equitable outcomes.
There is now a one-stop shop for such services and supports for state and local prosecutors. CUNY ISLG partnered with the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators team in early 2024 to launch the Prosecutorial Data Collaborative. Bringing together a team of data scientists, researchers, and practitioners, the Collaborative supports offices in building the infrastructure and culture necessary to not only effectively use data in their offices, courtrooms, and communities to support decision-making and policy, but to enable compliance with broader statutory requirements that may impact their work.
Learn more about the Collaborative and our other prosecution work.
Through that funding, we are able to offer offices two years of hands-on assistance from our team—participating offices are not required to financially contribute toward any of the services that are provided. If this type of no-cost partnership would be of interest to your state or local prosecutor’s office, please let our team know!
The Latest from the Collaborative: Alameda County District Attorney’s Office Data Dashboard
ACDAO partnered with the Collaborative to expand its data capacity, increase transparency to the public, and effectively prepare for and comply with a series of state-wide statutes that feature criminal legal system data collection and reporting requirements. The first phase of a Data Dashboard was published this week, shedding light on the review and prosecution of criminal cases in the county. See the press release for more information.
On our Blog: Over the summer, we worked with the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney to create a first-of-its-kind Law & Justice Dashboard that provided a comprehensive look at prosecutorial and law enforcement data, showing who is entering the pretrial system, why, and what outcomes follow. Read about it from researchers Ben Estep and Cecilia Low-Weiner.
Analyzing data and hearing from businesses to learn about equity, challenges, and opportunities in City contracting.
We’ve partnered with the the NYC Department of Small Business Services (SBS) to conduct a Disparity Study examining equity in procurement and contracting by City agencies.
As part of the study, CUNY ISLG is reaching out to business owners to learn more about their businesses, barriers they have faced in doing business or attempting to do business with the City, how processes can be improved to further the City’s goals for fairness and equity
All businesses can make their voices heard by responding to our brief Business Experience Survey, available in English, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Bengali, Arabic, and Korean; and soon to be available in Yiddish. This is your chance to tell the City what is and isn’t working in its contracting process, and what would help your business succeed.
The survey is open to all business owners and decision-makers and is expected to take roughly 10 minutes of your time. In exchange for completing the survey, you will be entered into a raffle to win one of 15 $200 gift cards.
Learn more about the project here.
Advancing Justice
New Insights on Bookings, Returns to Jail from SJC Communities
The United States has the largest population of incarcerated people in the world. Many of these people are not yet found guilty, awaiting the outcome of their case in local jails run by cities and counties. To fulfill this demand, local jails consume nearly $25 billion nationally in state and local funds—all while impacting the economic, physical, and emotional wellbeing of the incarcerated person and their family. For all of this, there is limited evidence that pretrial incarceration actually has an impact on public safety.
Faced with these facts, city and county officials across the country have begun to rethink jails, with the goal of safely reducing the over- and misuse of jail incarceration while preserving safety. Since 2015, cities, counties, and states have joined the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to identify and implement data-driven jail reduction strategies developed alongside stakeholders, experts, and the community. Fig. 1 shows the impact on jail populations so far.
FIG 1. JAIL POPULATION Changes
Since the initiative launched in 2016, SJC sites across the country have significantly reduced their jail populations.
In 2022, as part of its role as the lead data and analytic partner, CUNY ISLG launched Measuring Progress, an interactive tool that explores the impact of those strategies by highlighting trends in overall jail populations, bookings, and associated racial and ethnic disparities. Each view in the tool explores a different jail trend and enables users to drill down to individual SJC jurisdictions, helping stakeholders and the public track progress achieved by SJC cities and counties. This month, Measuring Progress expanded to include a new set of insights, highlighting the impact of SJC strategies on the individuals cycling through the jail system, what charges they are coming in on, how long they are staying, and whether they are returning to custody.
Fig 2: Returns to the Community
Individuals released pretrial to the community were no more likely to return to jail for a new crime after reforms were implemented than before.
Promoting Opportunity
A Multidimensional Approach to Healing Trauma in Communities Impacted by the Criminal Legal System
Nearly 9 in 10 of people who have been incarcerated have experienced a traumatic event in their life. 1 in 7 report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To address the prevalence and impacts of trauma, Exodus Transitional Community was funded in 2017 by the Criminal Justice Investment Initiative (CJII)—a partnership between CUNY ISLG and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office —to develop the Center for Trauma Innovation (CTI). The CTI aims to serve participants who have experienced chronic trauma through three core prongs: direct services, training and technical assistance, and a learning community.
The CTI has been working with an evaluation team at the Center for Complex Trauma (CCT) at Icahn School of Medicine to understand the program’s implementation and impact by using a community-based participatory research approach. As part of this evaluation, the partnership has produced a series of research briefs and a process evaluation report that explore these core prongs in theory, how they were put into practice by the CTI, and their impact on system-impacted communities in East Harlem:
A Process evaluation report of the cti
The CCT used a Community-Based Participatory Research approach to their evaluation of the CTI, which is detailed in the process evaluation of the program’s operations, indicators of impact, and areas for improvement. Read more.
research brief: reflexive knowledge sharing in a program evaluation
Knowledge sharing between researchers and community-based partners is a dynamic, iterative process that fosters mutual learning and effective collaboration. In this brief, evaluators have identified data-driven recommendations, conducted joint discussions between researchers and partners, and outlined feasible plans for the implementation of recommendations—all in partnership with CTI staff through the lens of reflexive knowledge sharing. Read more.
research brief: building an innovative Trauma-Informed Learning Community
CCT evaluators used the CTI as a case study to illuminate the process of leveraging community-research partnerships toward the development of learning communities, including challenges, solutions, and lessons learned along the way. This brief showcases the utility of learning communities for supporting innovation, growth, and collaboration among organizations working toward shared outcomes. Read more.
Research Brief: Understanding How Justice Impacted Communities Heal from and Cope with Trauma
This research brief explores how participants in the CTI have learned to navigate their healing processes and cope with trauma, emphasizing the impact of key factors—like gender, race, ethnicity, and time spent in the program—that influence these journeys. Read more.
Are you a survivor of gender-based violence who has had contact with the criminal legal system?
We want to hear from you!
We started The Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Project to understand the challenges GBV survivors who have had contact with the criminal legal system face when accessing services from New York City government agencies and service providers. The project will gather insights through interviews with survivors and service providers and use these insights to propose recommendations to improve practices.
We are currently seeking survivors to interview about their experiences. Get all the details here—and reach out to us at gbvproject2025@gmail.com if you or someone you work with is willing and eligible to participate.
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