CRIME

State attorney invites academics to create new data tools

Andrew Pantazi
apantazi@jacksonville.com
State Attorney Melissa Nelson's office is one of four selected for a new analysis of prosecutor data. In this photo from last month, she's seen talking after the death penalty trial of Donald Smith. [Bob Self/Florida Times-Union]

For years, criminal justice reformers have been preaching a message that no one wields more power in America than prosecutors. Yet as reform-preaching candidates have ousted incumbents, the public has lacked access to the kind of metrics that would track the fairness and effectiveness of prosecutors.

A new, two-year research project hopes to crack open the black box of prosecutor data by taking deep dives into the offices of four elected prosecutors, including State Attorney Melissa Nelson, creating new measures to track equity, efficiency and justice in Jacksonville and three other major cities.

The $1.7 million research project is headed up by Besiki Luka Kutateladze, a Florida International University professor with experience analyzing prosecutor’s offices. He plans to deploy a team of researchers to offices in Jacksonville, Tampa, Milwaukee and Chicago. The researchers will comb individual case files and implement new data-tracking tools that will detect racial bias, explain how plea deals work and see if policies are increasing the community’s trust in the justice system.

Right now, many states publish some form of data about outcomes. In Florida, people could look at conviction rates, incarceration rates and sentence lengths. But nowhere is there data that looks at how prosecutors reach those outcomes.

For example, from 2008 to 2016, 98.4 percent of all convicted defendants in Florida pleaded guilty, according to a statistical tool offered by the Office of State Court Administrator. But the data doesn't include how many reached negotiated plea deals with prosecutors versus pleading straight to judges. It also doesn't show what prosecutors’ initial offers were, how they changed over time and if plea deals varied based on the race of the defendant or the victim or the prosecutor.

Kutateladze hopes to change that. Three of the prosecutors, Nelson, Andrew Warren in Tampa and Kim Foxx in Chicago, were elected in 2016 as reformers who campaigned on a promise of making the offices more just. The fourth, Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm, was elected a decade ago and has voiced similar messages.

"They'll take a look at questions of bias in our work," Nelson said, "and depending on what they find, we'll take it and it'll inform how we train our lawyers and what we do." The data, she said, will also allow her to try to find ways to be more efficient.

Kutateladze’s researchers will look at what extra information can be tracked by prosecutors, such as if the defendant has any mental health or homelessness issues, why cases are dropped and why plea deals change over time. The plan is funded through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Kutateladze also plans to survey all prosecutors and do extended interviews with sample groups.

The new data, he said, will allow prosecutors to move beyond crime and conviction rates, statistics decried by academics as primitive and unworthy of serious consideration. Once Kutateladze's systems are functional, he said the plan should produce monthly reports for managers to review. "Mid-level management will be forced to respond to some of the findings," he said. "I'm not going to tell them solutions. I'm going to work with them to collect data to help them figure out the answers to the problems they have identified themselves."

Warren, the Tampa state attorney, said he hopes being able to look at the impact of different ways of handling cases — civil citation, treatment courts, incarceration — will help his office figure out how to improve safety. "The data reveals the truth. We welcome the truth here: the good, the bad and the ugly. We will replicate the good and deal with the bad and the ugly to make sure we have better outcomes for Hillsborough County."

Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution and an adviser to the project, said the data will also track the community’s trust in the justice system.

“For the first time, we have a critical mass of local prosecutors who are committed to changing paradigms and doing things differently. We have a group who, by and large, believe we criminalize mental illness or drug addiction or manifestations of poverty, and they’re looking for ways or new strategies to do their job better and re-envision the role of the prosecutor. What’s been missing from that equation is an equally fresh way to look at what we track, how we quantify success and how we think about performance in an office by an elected leader.

“We have been stuck for too long around metrics like number of indictments, rate of conviction, length of sentences, all of which are ineffective ways to judge this new thinking and this new role of the prosecutor.”

Fordham law professor John Pfaff, whose 2017 book “Locked In” argued that prosecutors were the driving factor behind increased incarceration, said this type of data will allow elected leaders to understand the impact of their policies. “When a [prosecutor’s] office implements a certain policy, one question is how does that affect individual cases, but also how does this affect macro-level outcomes like community respect?”

He said it remains to be seen if voters, who have been hearing about crime and conviction rates for decades, will buy into more nuanced data.

Ron Wright, a criminal law professor at Wake Forest, has researched prosecutorial elections and found that almost always elections hinge on a few outlier cases, either a prosecutor is criticized for being too harsh to one defendant or too lenient to another. In articles and in a book published last year, he has argued that society needs to find more data-driven ways to assess the effectiveness of prosecutors. He’s advising the new research project.

While the public release of this data would be the first of its kind, this is not actually the first time Kutateladze has done similar kind of work. In five prosecutors’ offices, he identified racial biases in decision making processes like filing charges, reducing charges, setting bail and other steps in the process. But prosecutors didn't allow him to publish the research, except in Manhattan where he received outside funding that allowed him to publish a report that found prolific racial bias in that office’s prosecutions. The goal of that report was to create an analysis that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance could replicate, but Kutateladze said the office hasn't stayed in touch with him.

This study is different. Prosecutors participating in this new study have agreed for all data to be published, regardless of its findings. Kutateladze said he hopes to have his first set of data in the fall. The goal, he said, is to create data portals that will be updated regularly. Already, Foxx in Chicago has started publishing online the limited data that office has. Nelson said she intends to do the same thing once the data comes in.

Kutateladze said he envisions prosecutors going to minority communities with data that show the racial disparities in the office and prosecutors showing how they're trying to address the issue.

Later this month, the elected leaders from the four offices will meet in Miami, along with a team of academic and policy advisors, and they will decide on the measures they hope to track.

Gipsy Escobar, the director of research for Measures for Justice, a data portal that uses court and corrections data in a few states including Florida and Wisconsin, educated the Florida Legislature as it was considering a bill that would require better criminal justice data collection. But even that data is looking at outcomes, like sentence length, not what prosecutors did to reach those outcomes.

“Prosecutors have an immense amount of power in moving policy and changing policy,” Escobar said. “I think this is really going to help prosecutors make data-driven decision makings instead of saying I’m going to get elected if I have a high conviction rate. It’s going to be very helpful because it’s going to have immense power to effect change by using more data-driven approaches.”

Chisholm added, "data projects like this allow us to break free [from tough-on-crime rhetoric] and show that more nuanced approaches can help set up a more stable community."

Andrew Pantazi: (904) 359-4310