A Case Study on Pivoting toward Impact in Fulton County, Georgia
By Samantha Parker, Research Associate
A technical deliverable is only as useful as stakeholders’ ability to adopt and operationalize it. Initially brought on to help collect and use data for a new pre-arrest diversion center, changing priorities meant the CUNY ISLG team had to work hands-on with partners to build new analytic and reporting pathways, ultimately strengthening the county in new ways.
Creating impactful change in state and local systems rarely follows a linear plan. Priorities shift, delays happen, and what feels urgent in one month can take a backseat in the next.
But when the work is grounded in data, community context, and collaboration, projects can pivot and address solutions to all the problems that arise along the way. This is what happened when CUNY ISLG researchers worked with Atlanta and Fulton County partners in Georgia to change course in the face of new challenges, develop new roadmaps, and ultimately leverage data to safely reduce the jail population amid longstanding overcrowding and poor conditions.
Initial Focus: An Alternative to Jail
In 2023, CUNY ISLG began a project with local stakeholders to strengthen data capacity and provide foundational support for ongoing reform efforts led by Fulton County’s Justice Policy Board in partnership with the City of Atlanta, supported by Microsoft’s Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. Building on earlier data infrastructure work by Bloomberg Associates, CUNY ISLG researchers and Fulton County staff met biweekly to support the Board’s work and the launch of a new Center for Diversion and Services (CDS).
The CDS was designed as an alternative to jail, particularly for individuals with behavioral health needs, offering on-site care, case navigation, and ongoing case management. These services meant people could avoid overburdened jails while receiving and maintaining treatment in the community—without jeopardizing community safety.
At the start, the work focused on preparing stakeholders to collect and use data on the CDS to measure its operations and impact. This included:
Developing a process map to understand the local criminal legal system, existing data systems, and pre-arrest diversion pathways.
Creating a performance measurement framework to track the CDS’s operations and impact.
Designing data specification templates that define key metrics, outline their data sources, calculation methods, and measurement frequency to help operationalize those measures.
Together, these tools provided a roadmap for how the CDS fit into the local criminal legal system data landscape positioning the county to start gathering meaningful, operationalizable data on the CDS once it got up and running.
While that start date was meant to be in spring 2024, administrative delays pushed back the CDS’s launch. Once operational, the center took some time to find its footing and experienced unexpectedly low utilization rates far below anticipated capacity. This reality required a rapid pivot to strengthen post-booking safety nets for individuals who did not receive the diversion opportunity, while stakeholders continued working to train law enforcement, establish referral pathways and build familiarity and buy in with the new resource. With these evolving circumstances, meetings between CUNY ISLG and stakeholders shifted to other pressing system needs.
Pivoting to Streamline Referrals through Better Data
One of those needs was data support for the Jail Population Review Committee (JPRC), a subcommittee of the Justice Policy Board tasked with identifying individuals in jail eligible for review who may not need to be incarcerated if they meet certain criteria. The JPRC focuses on people who are often stuck in jail incarceration due to poverty, procedural delays or acute unmet needs. The JPRC operates via several referral pathways, including through community providers (Grady Health, Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative (PAD), Georgia Justice Project, Women on the Rise). When one of their participants is booked into jail, they notify the JPRC team to add them to the review list.
Historically, the committee did not have an automated mechanism to extract jail data and had to manually look up people in the system, which was time consuming and prone to error. To address this need, CUNY ISLG developed:
A charge key to streamline and accelerate the identification of individuals eligible for review by automatically categorizing and flagging eligible charges.
A reporting template to provide a monthly summary of the committee’s progress and the state of the review list as well as visualizations for key metrics.
These tools can not only improve the efficiency of the JPRC but also show how flexible data support can meet emerging needs. Shifting priorities meant the Justice Policy Board was doing equally impactful work without diminishing focus on the Center, highlighting how flexibility and strategy can lead to efficient use of valuable time and resources.
In all, the project has led to meaningful progress in Fulton County in three key areas.
Building institutional capacity
Through collaborative work, CUNY ISLG worked with the County to not just frame data as a tool for safely reducing the jail population but also build internal capacity to sustain this work. The biweekly meetings encouraged partners to reflect on their practices and explore how data could strengthen decision-making, creating resources for the County to use beyond the partnership.
Delivering technical tools
CUNY ISLG developed and delivered tools to support multiple parts of the system. These tools will help evaluate operations and impact and enable more data-informed decision-making.
Laying a foundation for future progress
Even with delays in the CDS opening and low utilization from law enforcement, the process maps, playbook, and data specifications we created are highly relevant. These resources are ready to be activated as the CDS scales up, ensuring the county is well-positioned to measure progress and adapt over time.
Building the Blocks of Long-Term Change
These outcomes may not always make headlines, but they’re the building blocks of long-term change. It also reinforces an important lesson: a technical deliverable is only as useful as stakeholders’ ability to adopt and operationalize it. While the Center was built with extensive participation from key city and county stakeholders, its success depended on trust, clear roles, and shared ownership of the work. So far, Fulton County has continued to encounter challenges with CDS utilization. As the work continues, future priorities include clarifying roles and responsibilities for data reporting; building system-wide capacity to manage and use data effectively; and reinforcing shared goals so that data becomes a tool for collaboration, not conflict.
The path forward may not be linear, but progress shows the system is moving in the right direction. As data, analytic, and strategic partners, CUNY ISLG has helped the County’s local systems keep moving, even when the path forward was not perfectly clear; as an objective third party, researchers were able to voice concerns from stakeholders who were not comfortable or not effectively communicating to one another. Despite these challenges, this project has led to meaningful progress toward a robust data infrastructure, increased capacity, and long-term sustainability in Fulton County that will support their criminal legal system reform efforts into the future.
Photo by Drazen on Adobe Stock.