The criminal justice system in the United States produces vast amounts of data daily. However, these data are rarely used by agencies beyond the tracking of individual cases. Measures for Justice (MFJ) has developed a system that leverages the data already collected by local agencies to assess the health of the criminal justice system at the county level. This webinar will discuss the importance of using data to identify problematic patterns that need correction as well as best practices that could be replicated.
Webinar attendees will learn about the essential aspects of turning data into action, including:
- Developing performance indicators to track goals.
- Identifying the type of data needed to populate performance indicators.
- Addressing issues of data access and quality.
- Best practices for data processing.
- Communicating complex data in ways that are easy to understand by all stakeholders.
Presenters:
Dr. Gipsy Escobar has extensive multidisciplinary criminal justice research experience designing and managing complex research projects, mentoring staff, and communicating research results to varied audiences. As Measures for Justice’s Director of Research and Analytics (2015 to 2018) she worked with national experts to design and validate a system of performance measurement for local criminal justice and to develop a robust methodology to standardize the management of criminal justice data from varied sources across jurisdictions in the United States. Currently, as MFJ’s Director of Innovation Research, she focuses on developing partnerships with practitioners and organizations in the criminal justice space, exploring innovative ways to improve upon the performance measurement system (from data intake to publication), and providing expertise to states working on legislative and executive initiatives to close the criminal justice data gap. She also directs the Data Fellowship Team that is providing technical assistance for the implementation of criminal justice data transparency legislation in a Judicial Circuit in Florida.
Before joining MFJ, Dr. Escobar was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology and a faculty member of the graduate school at Loyola University Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests include crime and justice measurement, court case processing, prosecutorial decision making, program evaluation, and the spatial study of crime correlates at the community level.