Measures for Justice: National Data Portal

As the Measures for Justice Director of Technology, I built a team of engineers and designers from 2015 to 2020 to conceptualize and deliver the National Data Portal. This project was a huge undertaking by a small team of engineers and researchers who believed in an idea that everyone else said was impossible. Our hard work resulted in coverage in The New York Times, The Marshall Project, Salon and many others and established Measures for Justice as the leader in the criminal justice transparency space.

“It’s a sad reality that in today’s America there is no easy way to access the most basic criminal justice data from across the country. Better access to criminal justice data is important for informing efforts to make our communities safer and our criminal justice system fairer—after all, you can’t solve a problem if you don’t have the facts. We’re thrilled to be supporting Measures for Justice’s work.”

By 2020, Measures for Justice had collected court and prosecution data for 20 states at the county level. Users enter the portal on the following page, where they can select their state and county to view the data.

For each state measured users are able to select their county and see how their local criminal justice system is performing across our performance measures.

Users can select any measure for more detailed analysis allowing them to compare their county to other counties in the state.

Users can display map views and break the measure down even further by defendant and case characteristics for further analysis.

The national data portal had a significant impact on the criminal justice reform movement by providing transparency into local justice systems. The following video shows how people are using our data.

Since 2020, I worked to help Measures for Justice shift to a new model of partnering more closely with county practitioners and their communities to allow greater transparency and impact through Measures for Justice Commons.