Vera Institute Of Justice Launches New Data Tool To Track Links Between Incarceration, Economic Mobility

‍The Vera Institute of Justice last month published the first national data tool with a primary focus on the intersection between incarceration and economic outcomes. Despite the long-term impact on the economic well-being of millions of people in the United States, there are few data tools that track incarceration and economic outcomes across the country—and even fewer tools that make this data easily accessible. Spotlight spoke recently with Vera Research Director Jim Parsons about the new tool. The transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

‍Thanks again for taking time to do this Jim. If we could start by giving our readers just a brief overview of the Vera Institute and then I want to talk about this new project.

Absolutely. Vera is a nonprofit organization, we've been around since the early sixties, and we focus on issues related to the criminal justice system and immigration. So, projects which are designed to address mass incarceration, address the criminalization of poverty, address the racial bias in the system, and also, we do work on immigration and how immigration laws are enforced with the goal of kind of shrinking the system, making it less biased, fairer, and more humane. With that mission in mind, we use a variety of different approaches. We have researchers, advocates, communication specialists, and policy experts who all come together around a number of projects on a variety of issues.

‍And Jim, your specific role?

I direct an initiative called the Incarceration and Inequality Project. I'm a researcher by training, and this project focuses on, as the name suggests, the nexus of incarceration, poverty, and racial inequality.

‍And so, talk a little bit about this new tool that just came online in April I believe?

It’s a tool we've designed as a resource for people who want to know more about the connection between mass incarceration and the economic wellbeing of counties around the country. As your readers will be familiar, there's been a huge explosion in the use of mass incarceration over the past several decades. It increased almost sevenfold between 1972 and 2009 and over that period, millions of Americans have been swept into prisons and jails. That's true for the whole country, but also particularly for people of color in the U.S. and particularly Black Americans who've been massively disproportionately impacted.

Vera's done a lot of work on incarceration. We have a tool called the Incarceration Trends Project, which focuses on that five-decade period when there was this huge expansion. The Incarceration and Inequality Project lays a number of economic metrics over the incarceration data. It allows people to see how these different sets of measures have varied over time. It fills a gap because there are data sets on incarceration, there are data sets on economic outcomes but there's very little available which lets you look at those two different sets of trends in one place.

We first brought this together last year. We released a public data set, which is designed for researchers who want to use the data to address research questions. The data explorer we recently released is designed for people who perhaps don't want to access and download these large data files but want to be able to look at trends across the country to see places that are particularly impacted by a lack of economic opportunity and high rates of incarceration. It allows you to look at patterns and trends across the whole country, as well as taking a deep dive into individual counties. Someone who wants to understand what's happening in a place where they live or work can get a whole series of metrics for their county which allow them to track trends over time and also compare with areas that have similar economic and demographic trends, but use jail and prison far less.

‍Who are the people that you are hoping will use this? I'm assuming policymakers and advocates.

The primary audience that we're targeting are advocates—people who are making a case for either criminal justice system reforms or economic reforms. And because they're in perhaps one policy area or the other, they don't have good access to information that cuts across these different areas. People working on criminal justice system reforms have access to information on the impacts of the criminal legal system, but perhaps not to trends in terms of economic outcomes for places that are impacted by particularly punitive criminal justice policies.

If you look at the map on the data explorer, you'll see that places that have high rates of incarceration often also have a lack of economic opportunity. I don't think that's probably surprising to most people, and certainly not to your audience. But this allows advocates to have specifics about the places where they live and work so that they can make a more compelling argument to policymakers to address these kinds of systemic problems.

‍And presumably, you may also be able to look at a similar county where the level of incarceration is not as great and perhaps draw some lessons from that that may be useful.

Absolutely, that’s why we built that feature into the tools. If you’re on the East coast, you can find a similar area on the West coast, or the tool allows you to also just restrict it to your state because local examples are often more compelling.

‍I know it's only been out a short time, but do you have any sense of how people are using it or have you gotten any feedback on how it's being used so far?

We've got feedback that the way the interface works makes a lot of complicated information accessible. We also have a community advisory board that guides the work and just prior to release, we showed it to them and an advisory board member commented that an elected official in their area said it offered just the kind of information that they need. That was great to hear because that's exactly the use case that we designed this for.

‍I also know you’ve already identified a few interesting trends—could you highlight a couple of those?

When you look at the counties that are in the bottom quartile for incarceration rates, they are 10 times as likely to be in the top quartile for graduation rates than the counties that are in the top quartile for incarceration. So, what we found is this very strong relationship between, in this case, incarceration and access to educational opportunity. Similar for median income: Seven times more likely to be in the bottom quartile for incarceration and the top quartile for income.

The other trend that we've seen in the tool has to do with rural counties. Since 2009, incarceration has been going down in cities and up in rural counties and those places have also seen increasing poverty rates. Rural poverty is no surprise to anyone who tracks these issues. But the fact that those places with high levels of rural poverty are also seeing increasing levels of incarceration is perhaps just less on people's radar. And when you use the tool, you can see that's particularly an issue in the South.

‍And the tool is open for anyone to use, correct?

Anyone can use it. We have a series of documents which explain how to use the tool, and also technical documents for people who want to learn more about the data. It’s all open access. We are hoping it will be a place people can use as a stepping stone to dig deeper into the data and address questions.

‍And I assume you'll update it as new data is available.

Absolutely. The other thing to note is that the data explorer is a major part of this work that we're doing, but we also have other analysis and products that we'll be releasing over the coming months. In May, we’ll have a digital data story, which talks about the economic impact of being a mother with an incarcerated co-parent. The common thread, as you can tell, through all of these products, is thinking about the criminal legal system’s impact on poverty and inequality and coming at that from a few different angles. We released something last year, which looked at the impact of incarceration of black men on how that warps official unemployment figures. Because people behind bars are not counted in unemployment figures, higher rates of incarceration amongst working age black men makes it look like there's less labor force exclusion than there is. So again, using data to illustrate a different part of this issue, particularly to do with racial inequality.

‍What are some of the potential policy solutions you’d like to see come out of this work?

One of the big issues that needs to be a priority is bail reform, which really is the criminalization of poverty. On any given day, there are just under 2 million people behind bars in prison or jail, which in itself is a staggering number, but around about 420,000 of those people haven't been convicted and many of those 420,000 are there because they can't afford to pay bail. So, just in terms of the impact of poverty on criminalization and incarceration, that's a very obvious target. And studies have shown that changing bail policies and eliminating money bail, as a number of states have, is not related to public safety or crime.