It’s not every day the headlines announce government officials releasing mounds of data about their own operations. Actually, the frequency verges on the unprecedented. Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx’s decision to release information on years’ worth of her office’s decision-making is, in that light, astounding.
Legal scholars have lamented the existence of so-called “black boxes” within the criminal justice system. They arise whenever various dimensions of legal decision-making are unobservable to outsiders, whenever the reason for a decision is left unexplained. Whether it’s the jury or the prosecutor, the public rarely (if ever) has access to systematic information on their motivations and priorities. We can observe the outputs—who is charged, who receives a plea deal. But we only observe those outputs when the court official proceeds with the case. Without access to internal data, we cannot parse the determinants of, for example, different declination rates by race and crime type. For elected prosecutors, this information gap is thrown into sharp relief. The voting public is left to rely on their gut instincts and high-profile convictions when assessing an office’s track record in promoting public safety.
Data transparency is also relevant to the Access to Justice Lab’s work. Our expanding studies of pretrial release decision-making, although primarily focused on judicial discretion, can benefit from prosecutors’ data. Here’s how. The PSA’s developers define new criminal activity—a key outcome variable in our analysis—as any arrest for new charges. We can use the court’s database to locate all arrests that lead to filed charges. But what of the arrests that do not? We could merge the court data with jail booking information, but that comes at the cost of having to un-duplicate the dataset when a jail booking also leads to formal charges. The superior source would be the prosecutor’s own database; it contains information on all of the in-custody arrests and non-custodial citations regardless of eventual charge activity. It’s effectively a one-stop shop for identifying any new arrest following pretrial release.
Time will tell if Ms. Foxx’s bold action motivates other jurisdictions to follow her lead and facilitate evaluation of this relatively opaque player in the criminal justice system.