Crime and punishment, the data collection
I am picturing Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane in a Red Sox uniform. The wily, whitehaired campaigner is standing on the top step of the dugout at Fenway, looking out at the mess Chris Sale is going to leave the guy who reliefs him on the mound.
It’s Kane’s fantasy, for sure, to give up his prosecutorial profession for the entertainment industry that is pro sports. But sabermetrics, Moneyball, whatever you want to call the information revolution that’s changed baseball, is coming to his realm.
And we should all be rooting for it, because information is power, with increased chances for public transparency. Why depend on piles of paper when you can have Big Data working for you, with just a few mouse clicks?
Say you’re interested in the differences among those released prior to trial, as opposed to those kept behind bars in their local jails. What judges tend to keep defendants in custody? What is the dividing-line crime between probation and incarceration?
How many assault cases go to trial? How many road-rage instances result in actual penalties? Even casual readers of newspaper crime reports could be interested. I mean, it’s your tax money supporting the criminalindustrial complex.
If you’re a court watcher, jury-duty call up, or sakes alive, a criminal defendant, the days of huge court files and prosecutors lugging around piles of paper are running out of time. The age of data collection is upon us. And isn’t it about time?
So, there was Kane the other day, up on the third floor of the State Capitol, in a symposium that was put together by Marc Pelka, undersecretary of criminal justice for Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget staff, known as the Office of Policy and Management.
Pelka was joined by a team of researchers from the Urban Institute who released their 2018 survey of prosecutors from around the nation, on how much data is currently being collected, with an eye toward discovering barriers to gathering more.
Kane, who heads the state Office of Criminal Justice and the 13 assistant state’s attorneys, recalled back in 2007, in the wake of the Cheshire home invasion, the murder of a mother and her two daughters and the controversy over the death penalty, he argued that the state needed better information technology to manage witness statements, crime-scene photographs and police reports.
At this point, a dozen years later, file management remains mostly in the 1940s. “You had to see it to believe it,” Kane said. But the conversion from paper files, so easily lost and so hard to file orderly, is on the way.
“We’ve now created and it’s taken a long, long time to do it and a real scramble for limited funding, you’ve created a criminal justice information system, which has a platform to enable us to do that,” Kane said.
One thing the Urban Institute found was that while all prosecutors use data in some fashion, such as recording outcomes of cases, it’s not used to spot emerging trends, probably because of limited employees. Fully a quarter of the 141 responding prosecutors admitted that virtually no staff time was dedicated to data collection.
“The issue came up months ago on the campaign trail, engaging with communities around our state, and it was communicated to Gov. Lamont how important and crucial prosecutors are in the criminaljustice system,” Pelka said. “These sort or initiatives, diversion options, alternatives to incarceration, probation supervision, the extent to which those options are utilized in our criminal justice system depends a great deal on the level of confidence that prosecutors ascribe to those options available.”
He said that Lamont envisioned a way to bring together diverse constituencies, including the American Civil Liberties Union, to collaborate for better outcomes, drive policy and budgets, and increase confidence in the justice system through new requirements on data collection.
“We’re at a very exciting moment,” Pelka said. “We’re on the cusp of Connecticut prosecutors beginning to adopt an electronic case-management system.” It’s going to take a leap of faith on the parts of the prosecutors, he said.
“This will give us an ability not so much to respond to issues to further anybody’s agenda, but to sit down and say what kind of data can we collect?” Kane said. “How can we make good use of this data?”
Maybe as he’s reviewing data on crime and punishment at home some nights, Kane can still dream of that Red Sox manager’s uniform, as he listens to the radio broadcasts in the background.
One thing the Urban Institute found was that while all prosecutors use data in some fashion, such as recording outcomes of cases, it’s not used to spot emerging trends,