Measures for Justice Overview
Need To Know: Measures of Justice Overview Is a YouTube video that details the work that Amy Bach, founder of the Measures for Justice organization is doing working with big corporations such as Google to fight racial injustice that is prevalent in the American justice system with an online tool designed to compare crime databases in America. She founded the organization after writing a book titled Ordinary Injustice; How American Holds Court that focuses on data analysis to compare and illustrate how different counties are with their justice system and to find solutions for those that are lagging. Amy has received assistance from colleagues with professional degrees to collect the most accurate data with numerous sources used to ensure the accuracy of the statistics in each state. The data collected can help American citizens to search for their county according to different categories such as race, sex, age, indigent status, and type of crime. There is a lot of contextual information available and helps anyone looking to search for the local laws to see what fines are posed for breaking the law in the counties that are listed on the site. This extraordinary research was conducted in conjunction with the Political Science department of the University of Rochester even though there isn’t data on Rochester county as yet on the site.
The purpose of Measures for Justice is to provide innovative solutions for the justice system and to highlight where the problem areas are that need to be fixed and which counties stand out where crime is concerned. Amy hopes that her initiative can get different people from distinct backgrounds and not just an ordinary criminal defense attorney talking about why the problems in the American justice system exist and how they can be fixed. She wants these questions to spark conversations that lead to resolutions without any blame or competition within counties. The process of finding and extracting the information is not the most difficult when compared to the cleaning process which can be lengthy because it involves making sure that it is accurate by talking to prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges to ensure that the data is understandable and will not be misconstrued in any way. The website uses references and footnotes for citations to show the public that every nuance has a contextual meaning. Measures for Justice has been able to tackle many issues within the justice system at the early stages of its inception, the most important aspect of it is how it is saving time for prosecutors when they want to assess their progress. Something that would have taken months to assess and compare manually can now be done within five minutes at just one click of a button.
