The Justice Metrics Framework

About the Program

Category: Criminal Justice and Public Safety (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

The Justice Metrics Framework (JMF) is an initiative created to develop multi-sector outcome metrics for vulnerable populations at high risk of involvement in the justice system and enable data-driven decision-making to improve those outcomes. To develop JMF we addressed legal barriers to data sharing, technological challenges to linking and analyzing data from multiple information systems and engaged stakeholders with different and sometimes conflicting goals. In the JMF Baseline Report, we identified 112,000 adults who were released from jail or started community supervision in 2015 and tracked their service utilization and outcomes over three years. Our key findings included: the first few months after custody release or supervision start constitute a critical intervention period for individuals from vulnerable populations; individuals from vulnerable populations released from custody without supervision—or under informal supervision—had less favorable outcomes than those under more formal types of supervision; and, for individuals under Probation supervision, the transition to life after supervision could be a critical period to ensure continuity in service utilization.Ongoing JMF efforts include analyses to inform pretrial reform and estimating needs, service gaps, and outcomes to inform discussions of a committee tasked with making spending recommendations for 10% of locally generated, unrestricted funds.