Recidiviz

Recidiviz is a tech nonprofit that provides state government practitioners and policymakers with decision-making tools to reduce incarceration quickly, safely, and equitably. 

Today, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to turn temporary decarceration spurred by COVID into permanent change. COVID catalyzed a 17% reduction in the US prison population—almost 2x more than the last decade of reform. Necessity drove new thinking. States swapped onerous in-person probation and parole requirements for video calls, they stopped sending people to prison for minor technical infractions, they released low risk, vulnerable people early. These efforts saved thousands of lives. They also taught us a lot about what a new “normal” could look like.

As vaccines roll out, these COVID-era changes will disappear unless we act fast. Recidiviz needs to onboard new states and develop a rigorous evidence base around the effectiveness of COVID-era policies—how did these changes impact safety? Costs? Racial disparities? By leveraging prize funding during this unique time in our nation’s history, we can help states identify what worked, build a case to make effective policies permanent, and continue to monitor the impact of such policies, helping create a new starting point for criminal justice reform.

I’ve seen firsthand how our criminal justice system can be unpredictable, illogical, and cruel. You don’t want to catch it on a bad day.

When I was 5, my uncle went to prison for a nonviolent crime. He was a teenager, but got an initial 10yr sentence because his assigned judge “didn’t like mental illness.”

In college, I started working with incarcerated teenagers at a juvenile prison near Stanford. I soon realized my uncle was one of millions who’d entered the system as “idiot teenagers'' and never left. The problem was systemic—we couldn’t solve this one kid at a time.

So I started focusing on more scalable solutions. At Stanford, I studied how computer science and human-centered design could change behavior. I joined Google and started Recidiviz as a 20%-project to help established reformers accelerate change. 

Today, Recidivz works across 6 states. Last year, those states reduced revocations 85% more than the average state. We aim to work in 30 states and reduce the prison population by 150,000 by 2026.

My uncle is 42 and still in prison. Millions of families start down this path each year — our aim is that moving forward, most will have happier endings.

The U.S. comprises <5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prison population. Communities of color are disproportionately swept up: 1-in-12 working-aged Black men are behind bars, half of whom were arrested before age 23.

The effects are lifelong. 83% of those released will be rearrested within 10 years. And the effects are intergenerational — a child becomes 6x more likely to enter the system once a parent does.

Bipartisan support for reform dates back to 2009, but the U.S. still struggles to unwind a 40-year prison boom — data is fragmented across thousands of systems, and even when brought together, is often too stale to be useful. 

Recidiviz integrates our open-source tools with states’ existing data systems to help leadership see in real-time what is and isn’t working — and identify opportunities to do better. Their staff are supported with personalized tools that tell them when supervision clients are eligible for discharge, and receive support to connect those clients with housing, treatment, and employment.

We also forecast the human and fiscal impact of policy changes, to help legislators and advocates raise the ceiling on what these practitioners can achieve on a day-to-day basis. 

The uniqueness of our approach is that it’s technology enabled and designed to scale—not just scale from state to state but to scale within a state. Our tools reach thousands of individual decision makers that top-down reform often can’t reach, and the results speak for themselves. 

Today, most corrections leaders have to use incomplete, stale data to run their agencies. Staff often don’t get any data at all. Who is succeeding on probation and parole? How has recent legislation impacted recidivism rates? Stale data makes it really hard to understand what’s working, make changes, and track impact.

Recidiviz provides states with real-time data tools. We give leadership a real time picture of what’s working, and then we plumb that information through to the thousands of individual probation and parole officers, where we can use it to directly drive decarceral outcomes—who has stable housing, stable employment and should get off of supervision right now? Who has had trouble getting into treatment and needs attention right away?  

To do this, we need to integrate with states’ existing systems to standardize and stitch together previously fragmented data sources. This platform powers all of our tools and sits at the center of our approach.

The US prison system is a revolving door that millions of people enter when young and can never leave. It comes to dominate not just their lives, but their families’ lives — and then their children’s. 

Recidiviz achieves impact by:

1. Bringing prison, probation, parole, and programming data onto our data platform, enabling real-time insights.

2. Launching tools to help parole and probation officers see which clients need housing, employment, treatment and—critically—who looks eligible for early discharge from supervision. This reduces the number of people going to prison for minor, avoidable infractions.

3. Bubbling up metrics to leadership and helping visualize bottlenecks. Is a lack of addiction treatment causing prison admissions in a particular county? Is a lack of programming in a particular prison preventing people from earning time off their sentence?

4. Helping leaders make their data public and providing analysis to highlight proposed solutions to the legislature.

As more tools are launched, more trust is earned and bolder solutions are identified. Our first state, North Dakota, has now reduced recidivism by 16%, their probation population by 9%, and their prison population 25% during the pandemic—going further and faster than any other state to save lives and slow the spread of COVID-19.