USA: can better data fix Florida’s prisons?

A landmark law lets the state track people through the justice system. But that’s tougher than it sounds.

Florida has one of the largest and most expensive prison systems in the country. Each year, the state spends nearly $2.4 billion to keep roughly 100,000 people behind bars. And the system is rife with racial disparities: Black people make up 17 percent of the state’s population—and almost half of its prisoners.

Lawmakers are split over which is the more pressing problem: the high cost of locking so many people up or the overrepresentation of black people in prison. But they do agree that to address either issue, they need more data.

Last year, the Sunshine State became the first in the country to require its jails, prosecutors, public defenders, courts and prisons to coordinate their data collection, enabling lawmakers and the public to track how someone moves through the entire criminal justice system, from arrest to release.
The new information will be sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which will publish it online.Supporters of the new law hope it will bring transparency to an opaque justice system, illuminating where racial disparities begin while testing the merits of Florida’s strict sentencing policies. Research shows that long sentences increase prison costs, without improving public safety.

Now, backers say, the legislature can craft reforms that are informed by facts.
“This new data is going to allow us to see whether reforms are working or whether the criminal justice system is working, instead of just going by ‘common sense’ or folksy thoughts,” said Benjamin Stevenson, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.
Lawmakers approved a pilot in Pasco and Pinellas counties, in the Tampa Bay area on Florida’s west coast, to figure out the best practices for collecting the new information. Law enforcement agencies keep separate records, which vary from county to county. The goal of the pilot is to link police, court and other computer systems, standardize data collection, and create a blueprint for how all 67 counties will submit data to the state agency on July 1, when the new law goes into effect.

Florida’s court clerks bear the burden of the new reporting requirements. Lawmakers did not allocate money for the courts or other agencies to hire data analysts or upgrade computer systems. Much of the information the clerks will have to track will be taken from arrest affidavits, which are filled out by an officer and submitted to a judge who determines if there is probable cause for the arrest. But there’s a catch: Police departments across the state use different forms, and the new law does not require the departments to adopt a single document.

In 2017, police arrested more than 700,000 people, according to state data. If the legislature requires the police to use a single form, court clerks can automate the data extraction process, said Ken Burke, circuit court clerk in Pinellas County.

“Clerks get blamed for not being good stewards of information,” Burke said. “But we are like librarians. We keep track of the books, but we don’t get to say what the content of the book is.”
Florida already has mastered standardization with the hundreds of thousands of traffic violations written throughout the state each year, he said. Each county uses the same form, which is processed digitally.

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