CASE STUDY
Data and Transparency
in Prosecution
LOCATION
Nationwide
location
ACTIVE
2018-present
This portfolio of partnerships with prosecutors’ offices across the country offers in-depth technical assistance to create data-driven policy, practice, and operations.
Challenge:
After arrest, prosecutors are the de facto gatekeepers to the criminal legal system. In cities, counties, and states of all political stripes and geographical sizes, state and local prosecutors’ offices have a considerable amount of discretion when it comes to who is charged and will move deeper into the system. These decisions can be shaped by equity, safety, efficiency, and/or other community-specific goals. To identify, operationalize, and measure the success of these goals, many prosecutors’ offices—alongside other criminal legal system partners—have shifted toward policies and practices grounded in data.
To identify, operationalize, and measure the success of these goals, many prosecutors’ offices—alongside other criminal legal system partners—have shifted toward policies and practices grounded in data.
Using performance indicators and data-driven operational reviews to achieve concrete and measurable outcomes have become the norm in many agencies and offices. Still more are developing their data capacities internally or through external partnerships. Such data capacities are useful to assess and fortify agency functions, but beyond operations, and even more foundational to these agencies’ mandates, these capacities are fundamental to transparency and accountability in the criminal legal system.
The use of data and analysis—both for improving criminal legal system outcomes and holding them accountable—varies substantially across agencies, and is particularly underdeveloped at the point of prosecution. Prosecution remains one of the most opaque areas of criminal legal decision-making. The biggest driver of this opacity is prosecutorial culture itself, exacerbated by outdated technologies and infrastructures. As prosecutors have the most discretion and power to determine the fate of people in the criminal legal system, transforming this culture to support data-driven policy and practice is an obligatory element of broader change.
Approach:
Over the past several years, there has been movement among prosecutors to reimagine what success means in their offices. This includes diverting people who may not belong in jail from the system whenever possible to directing resources towards the small share of individuals who contribute the most harm to our communities. Making change at the point of prosecution requires commitment from prosecutorial leaders to examine their policies and practices and identify and advance those that lead to more equitable, effective, and safer outcomes.
To support, enhance, and sustain these efforts, CUNY ISLG’s experts draw on our research and operational expertise to help prosecution partners develop concrete, practical strategies to build data-driven capacity and tools that can support a variety of operational, policy, and practice needs. We do this through three key types of work, which can work alone or in combination, but are tailored to each office’s self-identified needs and priorities:
Data and Analytic Capacity-Building: This is a critical foundation for data-informed work. CUNY ISLG’s approach in this area starts with a wellness check of existing data, systems, and analytic capacity, along with an assessment of the office’s data and analytic interests and needs. The wellness check is used to inform a set of capacity-building improvements that CUNY ISLG then helps the office prioritize and implement. This work can be broad in scope—e.g., toward goals of accountability and transparency across the office—or targeted toward data and analytic capacity in a specific area—e.g., for tracking gun cases and their outcomes.
Action Research: We carry out analysis and research to help prosecutors better understand how decisions are made and the impacts of decisions, policies, and practices on a range of outcomes, including community safety and equity. Findings are then applied in practice, informing the development and implementation of policies and practices that advance equity and address other needs and gaps identified.
Performance Management: We help prosecutorial partners establish performance metrics on key goals and objectives and set up processes and tools to share them internally and externally.
Across all these work streams, we strive to ensure that community perspectives are reflected throughout the process.
Progress:
CUNY ISLG has implemented these approaches with different prosecutors across the country. Below are some key partnerships showcasing our work.
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In the interest of cultivating a one-stop shop for such services for a broad range of offices, CUNY ISLG partnered with the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators (PPIs) in early 2024 to launch the Prosecutorial Data Collaborative (“The Collaborative”). The Collaborative model builds on the success of the PPIs, which are tools that can assist prosecutors manage offices, assess performance, and ensure that the office’s practices align with the goal and policies set forth by leadership and staff. After uncovering opportunities with the PPI tools, we provide complementary in-depth analytic work in specific areas in which a participating office has identified issues and/or wants to enhance policy and practice. We also work with offices to build infrastructural improvements to further enhance data and analytic capacity over time.
The Collaborative is flexible, adaptable, and grounded in the needs and goals of partnership offices. Bringing together a team of data scientists, researchers, and practitioners, the Collaborative supports offices in building the infrastructure and culture necessary to effectively use data in their offices, courtrooms, and communities as well as to enable compliance with broader requirements that may impact the work of prosecutors, such as legislative changes to data and reporting. Offices also have access to a network of peers. The Collaborative is nonpartisan; our teams have experience working with offices in a diverse range of political, social, and legal contexts. We are currently working with an office in California and a cohort of offices in the Great Lakes region.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is currently funding this work. Participating offices are not required to financially contribute toward any of the services that are provided. We are actively seeking additional funding support to be able to work with a wider collective of offices. For more information, please read our Initiative Summary.
If this type of partnership would be of interest to your office, please let our team know. Email Jennifer Ferone at jennifer.ferone@islg.cuny.edu.
CASE STUDY: ALAMEDA COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE
In early 2024, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office (ACDAO) in California became a Collaborative partner. Having seen the benefits of the PPIs and data-driven work for other jurisdictions, ACDAO partnered with the Collaborative to expand its data capacity, increase transparency to the public, and prepare for and comply with a series of state-wide statutes that featured criminal legal system data collection and reporting requirements.
The partnership kicked off with a data culture and diagnostic assessment that provided a foundational understanding of the data and systems that currently exist, as well as where the gaps lay. Work is ongoing to move toward actively, effectively, and impactfully employing data to inform decision-making and policy and practice priorities. In addition, ACDAO published the first phase of its Data Dashboard in January 2025, shedding light on the review and prosecution of criminal cases in the county. See the press release for more information. The second phase of the dashboard will be made public later in 2026.
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In 2018, then-newly elected Brooklyn District Attorney (DA) Eric Gonzalez launched the Justice 2020 Initiative to increase community safety, fairness, and equal justice. The DA aimed to transform office culture by establishing community-based alternatives as the default response, and to focus resources on the cases presenting the most harm—all while engaging the community as partners throughout the process. Those objectives demanded a range of approaches and shifts, including strategies to facilitate a culture of data-driven decision-making and transparency in the Office.
To do this, the office partnered with CUNY ISLG to launch a Data and Transparency Initiative comprising two phases of work. In the first phase, a one-year capacity-building project, we helped the office identify and implement measures to improve its ability to track, analyze, and apply the data that support its most important policy and practice goals. This resulted in the hiring of a research director, the launch of a new case management system, and creation of numerous report templates.
In the second phase of the project, CUNY ISLG conducted a study to explore and understand racial and ethnic disparities in prosecutorial decision-making, using office administrative data and a review of approximately 300 case files. The full set of findings is summarized in the final report, Justice in Decision-Making. For more on the project as a whole, see the case study page.
Funded by Arnold Ventures and the W.T. Grant Foundation.
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Like many prosecutor’s offices, the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office had not invested in building sophisticated data and analytic systems—or facilitated a culture of transparency—to monitor trends related to community safety, incarceration, and other outcomes, or to use this information to inform decision-making and promote accountability.
Over a one-year period starting in 2020, CUNY ISLG carried out a comprehensive assessment of the Office’s current data and analytic capacity, and worked with system partners to develop and implement a performance metric framework for tracking racial and ethnic disparities at key decision points.
The end goal was a first-of-its-kind Law & Justice Dashboard that provided a comprehensive look at prosecutorial and law enforcement data, showing who is entering the pretrial system, why, and what outcomes follow. This process was iterative and collaborative, incorporating feedback from the Snohomish County Information Technology (IT) Department and other criminal legal system stakeholders in the county, in addition to the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. CUNY ISLG also worked with the IT Department to provide technical guidance on dashboard layout and design. See the dashboard here, and read about its development here.
Funded by the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative.
For more information on any of our prosecution work, please contact Jennifer Ferone at jennifer.ferone@islg.cuny.edu.
Bringing together a team of data scientists, researchers, and practitioners, the Collaborative supports state and local prosecutors in building the infrastructure and culture necessary to not only effectively use data in their offices, courtrooms, and communities to support decision-making and policy, but to enable compliance with broader statutory requirements.