Catching Up With Amy Bach, Founder & Executive Director of Measures For Justice and TCBP Laureate
The Charles Bronfman Prize tcbprize.medium.com
Amy Bach, like most of our Prize laureates, has had a busy year. Her organization, Measures For Justice (MFJ), is based in Rochester – the same city where yet another recorded tragic incident of…
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Paulette Light [PL]: Amy Bach , I’m so glad we’re getting this chance to catch up. The last time our community heard directly from you was in mid-March, just as our plans to present David Hertz with the Prize got derailed, and you filmed this video welcoming him to the Prize family (along with your sweet pup Lily!) It’s crazy to think that even on March 24th, we were already so exhausted by quarantine and COVID — and here we are over half a year later. How has this time been for you? Where are you?

Amy Bach [AB]: Obviously, we’re all deeply upset about what’s been happening across the country. I founded Measures for Justice so people working in the system could really see what’s happening in criminal justice at the local level, which is where so many of the travesties we’re seeing these days play out. I wanted to try to give everyone hard and fast truths — data — to help tell the story of what people experience every day, and of course to help make smart reform possible. The idea here is to develop a more transparent criminal justice system to generate trust and accountability. So here we are. We’ve almost got 20 states’ worth of court data out there that take a hard look at racial and other disparities from arrest to post-conviction, and now we’re turning our attention to co-creating free and public dashboards with communities and their prosecutors to generate fact-based dialogue, at minimum.

PL: Incredible. So much of what’s going on across the world right now intersects with your and Measures for Justice’s work. How has the COVID-19 pandemic specifically shone a light on the dire need for data — both in our justice system, and beyond?

AB: Data are obviously key to containing COVID-19 and eventually eliminating it. We’re all checking the numbers constantly — ICU beds, positivity rates, infection rates — because we intuitively understand the connection between data and solutions. Of course the same is true for criminal justice data.

When the numbers turn up a problem, they are also saying: channel your resources here.

This is why we have measures and filters — so we can see where racial disparities, for instance, are flourishing and in what parts of the system. It’s also worth noting that in places where we lack Covid data, people are fighting the pandemic blind. They have no idea how to contact trace, what to shut down, or even what to do. Again, the same applies to the criminal justice system. When you don’t know where your problems are, you cannot possibly hope to fix them.

PL: You’re completely right –– and I think all or most people are now starting to recognize how important data is, and how on a global scale (but particularly here in the U.S.) we really have failed to meet the need. Insofar as MFJ’s everyday workstreams or programs, how have you all shifted to respond to the pandemic? What are some exciting things your team is working on?

AB: The first thing we did was mobilize our data to see what the relationship is between incarceration and COVID. Rightly, everyone’s been talking about jails and prisons being dangerous spreading grounds for the virus. But we had a hunch that incarceration might play an even more destructive role in the virus’s spread. And we were right. We put our team on some incarceration data in Milwaukee and correlated them with COVID cases. We thought there’d be some correlation but we were pretty stunned to find out that incarceration rates in a community are a bigger predictor of community concentrations of COVID than age or race on their own. In other words, in communities where lots of people are currently or have been incarcerated, you find lots of COVID. This has everything to do with the social and economic effects of incarceration on communities, which certainly makes a good case for rethinking how we allocate resources to fight COVID and which also can help our governors and mayors get ahead of new outbreaks. Our study made some noise, and now we’re looking to expand the research to other urban centers.

We’re also now working with the Los Angeles Public Defenders’ Office on a really exciting research project to measure the impact of early release and decarceration. Because of COVID, thousands of people were released early or released pretrial in L.A. County who would not have been otherwise. The result is an unprecedented experiment that gives us the chance to test and measure the less carceral, less punitive approach to justice that so many have long championed. The project just got underway, so stay tuned!

PL: The correlation between incarceration and COVID spread that your study uncovered has been groundbreaking. We’re looking forward to seeing how these state and local leaders integrate the findings into their prevention strategies – and to seeing how the L.A. project turns out! More broadly, have you gotten any insight about how COVID has impacted our prisons, jails and courthouses?

AB: It’s well documented that COVID is a danger to people behind bars — from people convicted of a crime to folks who’ve been detained pretrial. And there are a lot of terrific organizations out there working on this as we speak. We’re looking more at how COVID and incarceration are related on the community level.

PL: On a perhaps brighter (if not bittersweet) note, the rise in protests and support for racial justice has been such a guiding light during this otherwise very challenging time. “Black Lives Matter” seems like it is no longer a political statement. It makes me hopeful that some positive progress is coming from all this. For decades, you’ve been in the trenches of data exposing mass racial inequities — so none of this is new to you. Do you think that some of what has been invisible for all of these years might be becoming more visible?

AB: I certainly hope so. But what makes the news is really only the tip of the iceberg. How can we show that? How can we demonstrate the magnitude of the problem? I’ve always thought data are a big part of the answer. Data plus stories equals change.

PL: Does any part of you think that this renewed attention and focus on our criminal justice system, through the eyes of the Black Lives Matter movement, will push the needle forward in ways that previously haven’t been prioritized? Or is COVID setting us back so much that it’s a wash?

AB: I think this time around, real change is coming. And that if anything, COVID has shined a particularly bright light on inequality and its disastrous effects. We get calls all the time about our data and how they can be mobilized for change. So I think the march is on, and it’s here to stay.

PL: On behalf of the whole Charles Bronfman Prize family, let me just say that we are so proud of the massive impact you’re having on the way our justice system functions and in carving out the path towards a more equitable world. To close out, we like to give our community an action item to get more involved in the issue area you focus on. What can the average person do to demand more accountability and transparency from their government officials and police departments?