Measures for Justice: Improving the Criminal Justice System

We’ve been exploring ways to help improve the criminal justice system to enhance public safety while also making the system fairer. Today, we’re proud to support Measures for Justice, a new online data portal that tracks data across criminal cases.

The U.S. imprisons more people than any other country, but it’s surprisingly hard to access data on how our justice system operates. And since criminal justice is mainly carried out at the local level, having good local data is critical to understanding what’s actually happening in our communities.

At the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we’ve been exploring ways to help improve the criminal justice system to enhance public safety while also making the system fairer.

Today, an organization called Measures for Justice is launching a new online data portal that tracks how criminal cases are being handled in different counties from arrest to post-conviction. Users can compare data within and across states and can filter the data by race/ethnicity, sex, age, offense type and severity, attorney type, and more.

The portal already has data from more than 300 counties across six states to start, and we are excited to help support their goal of collecting data from 20 states by 2020.

We hope this tool will make it easier for different communities to identify what’s working well and what’s not, supporting the work already underway to make communities safer and criminal justice fairer.

Learn more at MeasuresforJustice.org.