SCC-IRG Track 2: Supporting Transparency and Equity in the Criminal Legal System through a Community-Driven Digital Platform

Tulane University, New Orleans LA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to enhance both transparency and accountability within the criminal legal system in New Orleans by developing a comprehensive, community-driven data dashboard and analysis toolkit. The project addresses the critical need for better data infrastructure in a city with high incarceration and exoneration rates, aiming to provide community groups with real-time access to detailed court data. This information will enable informed policy discussions to foster positive changes in the legal system. By partnering with Court Watch NOLA and experts in computer science, law, and criminology, the project seeks to empower local communities to monitor and understand the criminal legal system more effectively. The project's goal is to transform the community’s ability to access and analyze court data in real-time. This step in the research will be accomplished through four key initiatives: engaging stakeholders throughout the development process to ensure the system meets diverse needs; creating a robust data ingestion solution that integrates fragmented court data, volunteer observations, and public records using natural language processing and missing data models; developing a data analysis toolkit leveraging causal representation learning to isolate determinants of judicial outcomes, and implementing active knowledge acquisition methods to optimize volunteer efforts. This interdisciplinary approach will advance community-driven data science and contribute to a deeper understanding of equity and bias in the criminal legal system. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.