Rochester's Amy Bach wins $100,000 award for work to improve criminal justice operations
Gary Craig, Democrat and Chronicle Gary Craig
Rochester's Amy Bach has received a noted humanitarian award, which includes a $100,00 prize, for her organization's criminal justice work.
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Democrat and Chronicle
In March the state of Florida took a step hailed by advocates of a fair and equitable criminal justice system: Lawmakers approved a bill that requires the gathering, harnessing and publication of an unprecedented amount of criminal justice data.

Wired magazine headlined a story about the measure. "Florida Could Start A Criminal Justice Revolution."

A spark of the legislation was the legwork of the Rochester-based nonprofit Measures for Justice — an organization that is being recognized nationally for its groundbreaking work with criminal justice data but which remains largely unknown locally. The organization, aware of the limitations of available county-level data, helped Florida lawmakers construct the bill.

"No one in Rochester really knows we're here except the tech community," said Amy Bach, a former attorney and journalist who created Measures for Justice in 2011 with a staff of two. It now has 48 employees — about half of them based in Rochester — and a budget of close to $7 million, which is almost triple its 2015 level.

And Bach, who saw the state of inequity in the criminal justice system as a lawyer and reporter and wrote a widely acclaimed book about the imbalance, is also being recognized. On Wednesday, she will be announced as the annual recipient of the Charles Bronfman Prize, which honors individuals under 50 years old for their humanitarian work. (Bach recently turned 50, but qualified by being 49 at the time the judges were making their decision.)

Bach is the 16th recipient of the international prize, which “seeks to honor today’s Jewish heroes.” Past honorees include individuals fighting for the rights of refugees, for international prisoners of conscience, for the disabled and for veterans. The award includes a $100,000 prize.

"Amy’s work revealed a gaping hole in our criminal justice system, and she developed an ingenious method for filling it," said Charles Bronfman, a well-known philanthropist and businessman who previously owned the Montreal Expos baseball team. “She epitomizes the concern for social justice and entrepreneurial spirit that the prize recognizes."

In awarding the prize to Bach, the judges noted that Measures for Justice is "the first organization to use data to quantify how the criminal justice system is performing from start to finish in counties across the United States" and that "Measures for Justice’s unique solution is to supply legislators, practitioners, change makers, and everyone with the data needed to see what’s really happening in their local criminal justice systems."

Bronfman's family created the prize to honor his philanthropic work.

"Amy's perseverance to create transparency in criminal justice is really the story of what it takes to challenge human rights abuses everywhere,” former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, part of the group that nominated Bach, said in a statement.

Bach first highlighted criminal justice weaknesses in her 2009 book, Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court. The book showed the vast differences of criminal justice workings from county to county, even with counties in the same state. One prosecutor in Mississippi, for instance, had not prosecuted a domestic violence case in 21 years.

The differences weren't the handiwork of nefarious and ill-intentioned officials, but often people so overwhelmed by the system and its workload that they were blind to inefficiencies and inequities that added up to injustice.

Her research also revealed that the data that could reveal those inequities were either nonexistent or ignored.

"You can't do all the (criminal justice) reform you want to to unless you do this first," she said of the data-driven legwork of Measures for Justice.

Measures for Justice scoops up county-based criminal justice data to give those working in the system — and anyone else, for that matter — a picture of how the system functions in the local community and how it compares with others. It allows the data to be filtered by age and race and gender.

A community’s residents can easily search out data about available schools or hospitals, but very little to tell them of the efficacy of their criminal justice system, Bach said in an interview Tuesday at Measures for Justice’s spacious and newly refurbished offices on University Avenue in the Neighborhood of the Arts.

"Don't you want to know if the justice system is fair and it's safe ... and it's fiscally responsible?" Bach said.

Measures for Justice, which relies largely on funding from various foundations, has pieced together the data from six states and plans to do 20 by 2020. Bach still wants to tackle New York, but, so far, has only been able to extract the data for five downstate counties from New York officials.

Measures for Justice uses a bounty of data, tracking the criminal justice mechanisms from arrest through prosecution through post-conviction probation and parole systems.

"We do the whole system," Bach said. "We think one part of the system is connected to another."

There is occasional pushback from local officials but, more often than not, a willingness to tackle disparities — such as distinct racial differences with bail decisions in one community — and craft changes and solutions.

This year, Measures for Justice moved from its Park Avenue offices into the top two floors of 421 University Avenue, the former Susan B. Anthony Memorial Hall.

Built in 1914, the building was once a gymnasium for the University of Rochester women's campus. Refurbished by owner and developer David Pelusio, the building's towering windows and glass-door cubicles provide an open and welcoming interior that Bach said is a fitting home for MJI's push for "transparency."

A native of New York City, Bach now lives in Rochester with her husband, Dr. John Markman, who heads the Translational Pain Research Program in the department of neurosurgery at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and their 10-year-old son, Leo Markman.

Rochester has provided her with a highly skilled technological team, Bach said.

"My whole tech team is incredible," she said. " ... Rochester is the perfect place to have a tech start-up."

GCRAIG@Gannett.com