"13 Important Questions About Criminal Justice We Can’t Answer. And the government can’t either."

The title of this post is the title of this notable new Marshall Project piece by Tom Meagher. Here are excerpts:

The open secret is that we know very little about much of how the criminal justice system operates in America. These aren’t things the government knows and won’t tell us (though there are plenty of those, too). It’s because state, local and federal governments, which ought to rely on data to inform the policies they enact, just don’t know.

In some cases, the federal government commissions criminal justice surveys that offer national estimates, often years after the fact. But the kind of granular, local, real-time data that powers most industries is all but absent. The number of times police use force or shoot someone in the line of duty are just the most obvious examples in our current national conversation.

Among the things we don’t know about our criminal justice system:

◾ how many people have a criminal record

◾ how many people have served time in prison or jail

◾ how many children are on some type of supervision or probation

◾ how many juvenile offenders graduate to become adult offenders

◾ how often people reoffend after being released from prison

◾ how many shootings there are in America

◾ how many police are investigated or prosecuted for misconduct

◾ how many people in America own guns

◾ how often police stop pedestrians or motorists

◾ how many incidents of domestic violence are reported to police

◾ what percentage of those eligible for parole are granted release from prison

◾ how many corrections officers are disciplined or prosecuted for abusing prisoners

◾ how many criminal cases are referred to prosecutors and how they decide which to pursue

The excuses for why we don’t have better data about our police, our courts and our prisons may sound familiar to anyone who has worked in corporate America: there isn’t enough money to hire analysts; the IT department says it can’t be done; the chief is moving on to another department.

Local autonomy has not been helpful for good criminal justice data. The fraction of the country’s 18,000 police departments that do collect figures on officers’ use of force have no consistent definition of what constitutes force. Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Safety Performance Project, cites similar issues in other parts of the system, like probation. There are thousands of probation agencies, but they are either run at the state or local level. In one place, probation is part of the executive branch; In another, it’s part of the judiciary. The lack of consistency makes contacting all the agencies a daunting prospect, much less moving them toward timely and uniform reporting of statistics....

There is one part of the Department of Justice tasked with collecting and publishing data: The Bureau of Justice Statistics. But no one argues that the bureau, which is a clearinghouse for all kinds of data on police staffing, prison rape, crime figures and more, should be doing it all by itself.... “I don’t think the BJS can do it,” said John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York. "Every year, Congress asks them to do more and more already. I don't think they have the capacity to do any more. They do amazing stuff, but I don't think they can."

When it comes to bad data, police aren’t even the worst offenders. While there is data on policing and corrections and some on the courts themselves, the biggest piece missing is information on how local prosecutors operate. "We have really no data whatsoever on what prosecutors do, almost none,” Pfaff said, adding, “We don't know what they're doing, why they're doing it and what drives their decision process."

And that ignorance has an impact on efforts to reduce incarceration levels and lower sentences. Because we don’t have data on how prosecutors work, we don’t focus on them when we talk about reforms, Pfaff said. Gelb called prosecutors “the biggest and most significant black box to be opened in the system.”

The problem with a lack of data on the criminal justice system is more than just budgetary. It’s a cultural issue that gets to the heart of why criminal justice reform is so very difficult. “For some [police] departments there may be cultural resistance to looking too closely,” Katz said. “Police departments can be very insular, very closed off. Within the closed system they may not even perceive that this may be a best practice.”

This aversion to transparency has rubbed off on lawmakers, who may find the numbers mildly interesting, but not really necessary to guiding policy for a system that largely runs itself, according to Gelb. “If that's the approach and the attitude, why would you need to have real time, actionable data for policy decisions? Policy makers have not seen the need for it,” he said. And what we — and policy makers — don’t know about criminal justice could fill a prison.