This story astounds me - what an impact one person can have!
From the subscribers-only version of Future Crunch.
Meet Clementine Jacoby, a not-yet 30-year old, former Google software engineer who created Recidiviz, a non-profit technology company using big data to create a fairer criminal justice system and solve mass incarceration across America.
Clementine was five years old when her teenage uncle was imprisoned for a non-violent crime and when he was released ten years later, she watched him struggle to keep a job or stay out of jail. The experience sparked a deep calling to repair a justice system that was failing to help people break the cycle and rehabilitate their lives.
While studying cognitive and computer sciences at Stanford University, Clementine taught dance at a local prison and after graduation travelled to Brazil as a volunteer in a circus performance program aimed at reducing gang-related violence in young offenders. Realising “circus school was clearly a better crime deterrent than incarcerating kids” Clementine decided to tackle her country’s incarceration problem, which stemmed from outdated technology and a lack of unified databases or resources to track what was working.
Clementine was working as a project manager for Google Maps when she experimented with applying the same analytics tools, to update the prison system. In 2017 she launched Recidiviz as a side project, with a mission to help criminal justice agencies safely reduce incarceration by turning complicated prison and parole data into easy-to-view information, allowing decisionmakers to track the impact of programs and policies in real-time.
By February 2019 Recidiviz was a stand-alone organisation and when COVID hit in 2020, thirty states engaged Clementine’s company to help to predict and prevent outbreaks of the virus among prison staff and inmates. During that time, the company also helped authorities identify and release 44,000 ‘appropriate’ inmates across the partnering states.
As the name suggests, Recidviz is also tackling recidivism, “the tendency of a criminal to reoffend” by providing valuable data-driven insights, like whether an incarcerated person has shown progress after a treatment program and how trajectories change when officers help ex-prisoners find stable housing and work. All this data is empowering authorities to reduce incarceration, maximise re-entry success and ultimately create systemic change.
"The focus on finding low-cost solutions was key. If you listen carefully upfront, you’re much more likely to build something of value to the person you’re trying to help." Clementine Jacoby,