Recidiviz is a team of technologists committed to getting decision makers — from policymakers and corrections leaders to individual probation and parole officers — the data they need to drive better criminal justice outcomes.

Recidiviz works with corrections directors, probation and parole officers, policymakers, and people in prison and on supervision to design tools that bring real-time insight into what’s working, what isn’t, and what actionable steps leaders can take to improve outcomes.

Team

Recidiviz is a team of software engineers, data scientists, designers, product managers, and more. 

Our team is supported by an incredible Advisory Board and Board of Directors. Our tools are designed in partnership with our Trusted Tester network.

Approach

Our approach has two key steps:

1. Bring data from fragmented agency databases into one place, providing a real-time, end-to-end picture of the system
2. Build simple tools that get decision makers the right data at the right time, in order to accelerate earned release, prevent avoidable prison admissions, reduce disparities, and improve reentry outcomes.

Why data?

The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world. Communities of color are disproportionately swept up. The growth in incarceration hasn’t reduced crime and costs $182 billion per year. Bipartisan calls for reform are a decade old, yet declines have been modest.

In part, that’s because there is no single criminal justice system—there are 50 state prison systems, 3,000 counties jail and court systems, and 20,000 cities police departments. The underlying data to diagnose what’s working—at a system- and individual-level, are just as fragmented. As a result, policy reform is just the beginning—distributed implementation is a real challenge, and for that we need scalable tools and data. 

Across the country, policies exist to help improve outcomes, but without the data in the hands of ground-level decision makers, they can’t reach their intended impact. Recidiviz uses technology to do what it does best: scale data-backed solutions.

State Partners

We work with some of the most innovative corrections leaders in the country. Each has different problems to tackle, each has a unique vision, but all share the goal of using data to drive better outcomes for communities, for people in prison and on supervision, and for their staff. Read more about our state partners here. 

We partner with nonprofits and researchers across the ecosystem. Read more about those collaborations here or explore some of the public-facing tools we’ve built together.