My guest today Clementine Jacobi is spearheading a transformation of the criminal justice system.

How is a 31 year old woman who had never worked in this era before making such an outsized

impact by using data in ways it's never been used before in criminal justice?

We started checking the data to try to find like where did we go wrong and it turns out

we hadn't gone wrong.

There were thousands of people who were past their release dates.

Welcome to People I Am Mostly Admire with Steve Levin.

Clementine Jacobi started her nonprofit called Residivis.

Around the same time I started my first center at the University of Chicago.

We're both trying to change criminal justice and she's having a lot more success than I am.

I'm curious to hear how she's made so much happen so quickly.

How do you describe Residivis to someone who's never heard of it?

Residivis is a tech nonprofit and the thing we're trying to do is dramatically and safely

reduce the footprint of the US criminal justice system.

We're trying to reduce incarceration and reduce disparities at the same time while making

communities safer.

At the most basic level our strategy is to work with the people who make decisions about

who goes to prison how long they stay and who gets released and equip those people to use

their data to make decisions better.

There are these people called corrections directors and they are over not just prisons but

also probation and parole which turns out are responsible for half of prison admissions

in the US which I think is pretty astonishing.

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