Hi, I'm Zo (co-founder). We have no affiliation with Zoom. But given the fortune they’ve made recently, we would certainly appreciate it if they donated (
https://bit.ly/2z7J4CP).
While many of us are Yale students, we come varying backgrounds. I'm a Nigerian-American (born in Chicago, spent my early childhood in Nigeria, and now live in CT). Gabe is Brazilian, Jesse is from Iowa, etc. We all connected on this project because we are committed to social innovation and want to do all we can to stop the exploitation of loved ones of incarcerated people, who are disproportionately low-income.
Re data and prediction: scholars of incarceration lament the dearth of data on the criminal justice system.
NYTimes- “Missing: Criminal Justice Data” (https://nyti.ms/2FUEkDq)— “Criminal justice data in this country is hard to come by. It can be messy and difficult to understand. And in many cases, the data doesn’t exist at all...Missing data is at the core of a national crisis.”
John Pfaff- Locked In (https://amzn.to/3aZYB5X)— “Perhaps even more troubling, there are some issues where we simply have no data, where almost nothing at all is gathered.”
Elected officials are creating criminal justice policies, that impact millions, with limited information. We want to inform better policymaking using data analytics. The folks are Measure of Justice (https://measuresforjustice.org/about/overview) are leading way, and we want to help where we can.
Scholars of algorithmic bias have convinced me that algorithmic risk assessment has disparate impact on minority groups, so I’m personally not in favor of these tools (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/1/eaao5580; https://ssrn.com/abstract=3257004). We will not be doing any risk assessment etc. Using past data to better understand and predict how the state prison populations might change in the future could yield insightful information.
In my home state of CT, “between 2008 and 2018, the state prison population has fallen by 30 percent, and the minority prison population has dropped by 32 percent” (https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/02/13/ct-prison-populati...). The article also notes:
“Marc Pelka, undersecretary of the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management’s Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division, told the News that while it is “hard to pinpoint a single policy or trend,” he named a few reasons for the decline in state prison population.”
Understanding why states like CT have been effective in reducing their prison population could help other states do the same. I really appreciate the feedback, we will make our language around data analytics more clear. Please keep the comments coming!
Zo