The Monroe County District Attorney’s office has a new tool in its arsenal, and it is intended to guide the organization toward more equitable approaches to justice.
Commons is a data aggregation tool developed by Measures for Justice, a Rochester-based organization that works with communities to track various criminal justice outcomes across racial, age, and gender demographics. The purpose is to create a clear picture of how people are treated in the courts, and for the prosecutor’s office to take steps to reach outcomes which better serve both the defendant and the community.
“If you really want to create a tool to revolutionize how the system works, you have to create a tool that shows the facts,” said Amy Bach, founder of Measures for Justice. “What Measures for Justice does is give neutral data so it can be accessible and transparent to both the communities and the criminal justice leaders.”
The Commons platform is tied to goals set by the District Attorney’s Office aimed at providing a more equitable and thoughtful prosecution environment.
District Attorney Sandra Doorley has set a goal steering 10% of low-level offense cases to diversion, for example. Diversion programs use specialized courts, such as drug or mental health courts, or programs such as employment training to help keep people avoid incarceration.
“Using these data, we intend to increase diversion opportunities for low-level defendants to 10%, while focusing trial resources on the more serious cases… all in service of keeping our families safer,” Doorley said, in a statement.
Commons currently displays statistics from cases prosecuted by the District Attorney’s Office on a monthly basis from April 2022 to March 2023. In that period, misdemeanor diversions hovered between 1.3% and 2.5%, save for May 2022 when 11.4% of cases were diverted. That month had a particularly low caseload of just 35 cases, compared to most months having around 400.
Across Monroe County courts, Black defendants have been less likely to have their cases steered toward diversion programs than white defendants. Over the 12 months documented, an average of 1.2% of Black defendants charged with misdemeanors were diverted per month while 3.6% of white defendants charged with misdemeanors were diverted.
Bach said racial disparities in the criminal justice system can never be adequately addressed if data isn’t compiled and analyzed.
“You can’t change what you can’t see,” Bach said. “You can sit in court all day long, and you might not understand a word of it. But you could look on our website and see what cases are being charged, who’s being charged, how long people are staying in jail, you can see who’s getting a break, who’s getting diverted and who’s not.”
While Measures for Justice is based in Monroe County, the Commons tool was first launched in Yolo County, California in 2019. At the time, the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office had set a goal of consistently diverting 10 percent of its felony cases.
According to data from Commons, it was largely successful in that goal with the diversion rate hovering between 7.3% and 19.3% from March 2022 through March 2023, the most recent available data.
Measures for Justice also plans to launch a similar tool analyzing the Rochester Police Department. That is expected to launch in January 2025.
