Under the Hood: Why Our Platform Is Open Source, Modular, and Interoperable

Every day, corrections software supports decisions with enormous stakes for public safety and people’s liberty: custody and supervision levels, earned and good time, and when someone goes home. Too often, the agencies responsible for those decisions don't control the technology shaping them. They’re locked into systems they can’t easily see into, change, or replace if they’re no longer serving their needs. It doesn’t have to be this way.

From the beginning, the Recidiviz Corrections Platform was designed around the principle that public dollars should go towards software that keeps government agencies in control. We created open source software that is modular and interoperable, granting agencies autonomy and flexibility over their systems. Here’s what that actually looks like: 

First, we believe software funded with public money should be transparent to both government and the public. 

We build open source software where our code is public. Picture government software built two ways: like a car made of Legos, or one glued together and sealed. Both drive fine, but only the Lego version can be taken apart, examined piece by piece, and put back together. That's how the Recidiviz Corrections Platform works—any government tech professional, researcher, or auditor can “look under the hood” and examine our code to better understand how it works. At the federal level, open source technology is becoming more encouraged.

Importantly, open source means open code, not open data. All data remains private. One other crucial piece stays closed on purpose: the state-specific logic that maps a state's data into our platform. Publishing this logic would reveal the internal structure of a state's own systems, and that's not ours to make public.

Another benefit of open source software? If a black hole opened up tomorrow and swallowed Recidiviz whole—which we really hope doesn’t happen—the open source nature of our software means your government agency would still have access to the code and could run it itself. This means that the impact of our work can outlast any specific state relationship: any state ending its partnership with Recidiviz has access to its data and the code.

Second, we create modular and interoperable architecture to offer government agencies greater autonomy.

With modularity, you choose what your agency needs. Back to the car analogy, if you’re facing a snowy winter, you might need snow tires. With the Lego car, you can swap out your existing tires for snow tires and better navigate icy roads. With the glued car, you don’t have the option to swap just the wheels. Instead, you need to buy an entirely new glued car with snow tires. With the modular Lego car, you can fix, replace, or augment the components as your needs change. That’s how our platform is designed—you don’t need to procure one large, all-or-nothing package. 

Another benefit of modularity is that you get a flexible deployment schedule, where you can toggle between speed and change management. Your first modules can be live in months and the next modules weeks or months after that, all while we’re simultaneously improving the first, and so on. This means you’re not waiting years to get everything at once. 

You also get the flexibility to determine which staff and facilities get the modules and when. You know your team best, so you decide how to roll out new software, and at what pace. Staff in one facility can test the dynamic classification module while staff in another pilot the meetings module. Instead of introducing a wholesale new technology that staff must adopt on day one, you can ease them into it, with training and change management happening at the pace your agency can absorb.

Interoperability is what makes this all possible. The Recidiviz Corrections Platform is built on open standards and APIs, so tools from other vendors can connect to our data and workflows. We know this integration from the other side because we've connected our tools to existing systems to read and write data back to them directly. No software company is the best at everything, including us. Interoperability means you don’t have to pretend otherwise.

We're honest about what this asks of government IT teams, because it’s not nothing. Our tools typically need data from your systems, and integrations need some tending—transfers run daily and errors need correcting. What we can promise is that we carry as much of that weight as possible. We’re happy to take on the unglamorous aspects of the work, like data cleaning and transfer handling, so that your tech teams can focus on their priorities. 

We've built automated, two-way integrations so that systems stay in sync without manual effort. Most IT teams are leading massive modernization projects. We work alongside you during these migrations, adapting our products to work with your old and new ones and every iteration in between. Each piece we take on is one fewer piece of the legacy stack that your IT teams have to modernize alone.

Finally, we don’t do change orders. Corrections processes and policies should evolve over time, and our software changes with them. 

Whenever we work with a partner, we align on key opportunities and challenges, and build a plan and contract from there. We ask: What are the pain points your staff is experiencing, and how can technology address them? What modules could help you meet your vision, or help you implement a new policy? What pace of change are you comfortable with? 

Software costs should be predictable, and they shouldn’t get in the way of tools keeping pace with changing needs and policies. Our contracts operate under flat annual fees, adjusted no more than annually in collaboration with our state partners. There are no intra-year change fees, per-usage charges, or hourly fees for making in-scope updates. During the contract period, our goal is to deliver as much value as possible. We build alongside the officers, supervisors, and case managers who use our tools every day. Many of our best features exist because a parole officer or case manager asked for them. We test, incorporate feedback, resolve issues quickly, and continuously improve. 

If your staff have an issue with a feature, we fix it—and don't send a follow-up invoice. If a policy changes how an existing product should work in the contract period, we update it—and don’t send a follow-up invoice. We do this all the time, helping partners meet new work-release policies or administering new assessments to folks once they’re released from prison. We consider this basic maintenance to keep your software accurate and running smoothly, and you shouldn’t have to pay more for basic maintenance. 

When the contract period ends, we discuss what makes sense for the next iteration of the partnership and the product roadmap. This is when we talk about money: when we’re entering another contract period for genuinely new capabilities that we’ve scoped together. 

You might ask: Why would a software company choose to build this way? Doesn’t this undercut their profits? Because we’re a nonprofit, we optimize for impact, not profits. Our incentives align with government, and we look at outcomes-based metrics like reducing recidivism and time to stable employment or housing. 

From intake through reentry, our goal is to create software that saves staff time, shows leadership what's working, and improves outcomes for the people moving through the corrections system and the communities they return to. Open source, modular, and interoperable is how we make sure our technology serves those goals. When needs change and your department advances, your software shouldn’t hold you back.