How a Spreadsheet Could Change the Criminal-Justice System
Judges have various restrictions on what they can say publicly, and for that reason, you don’t often hear our voices in contemporary public-policy debates. But as momentum builds to address deep inequities in our criminal-justice system, we feel it’s important to highlight a problem lurking in the background that could jeopardize these efforts: Many court systems lack basic data about themselves, including about their criminal-sentencing decisions. This means that when a judge considers a sentence for a criminal defendant, he or she has no way to evaluate it against others handed down for similar crimes in the same state, or even the same county.
Most people agree, in theory, that a court should treat similarly situated defendants equivalently in terms of their sentences. But this is not happening in practice. Criminal sentences for both violent and nonviolent cases vary widely from court to
