How Google.Org Fellows Are Helping Use The Power Of Data For Criminal Justice Reform – Forbes

Aria Ashton, a Google.org Fellow

Google has always been famous for its program that allowed employees to use 20% of their time to work on whatever they wanted - an initiative that famously produced Gmail, Google Maps, Google News, and even AdSense.

Extending that idea even further but now focusing on social impact, Google.org has just celebrated the one-year anniversary of its Fellowship program, which enables Googlers to apply to do full-time pro bono work for up to six months with grantees working in areas like education, criminal justice, or economic opportunity. The Fellowship program is a key part of Google.orgs approach to philanthropy as Fellows and nonprofits work as a team to build solutions that have a sustained and lasting impact.

The approach is rooted in Googles purpose which is To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. For example, this past December, thanks to the help of its Fellows, the Vera Institute of Justice released People in Jails 2019, a first of its kind look at real-time jail data which includes surface trends and draws actionable insights about U.S. jail populations.

I sat down with Google.org Fellow, Aria Ashton, who participated in the Fellowship with Vera, to find out more about her journey.I began by asking how the program first caught her attention. Volunteering in my community has always been an important part of my life and Im usually looking for ways to help folks in need. I learned that Google.org runs a Fellowship program that enables Googlers to do pro bono work full-time for up to six months, to help nonprofits solve some of their toughest challenges by filling in gaps that Google technology and expertise can help address. I was fortunate to learn that they were seeking a Program Manager for a project with Vera Institute of Justicean organization working to improve justice systemsto bring transparency to jail data nationwide. It was the perfect fit not only was this an opportunity to apply my own set of skills to an urgent problem, but I was already personally connected to the issue of criminal justice reform. Its incredible, really, to be given the opportunity to put your normal day job on hold for a period of six months in order to work full-time on a project with an enormous potential for positive impact, said Ashton.

The issue of criminal justice reform is something Ashton was passionate about for personal reasons. Ive seen first hand some of the failures within our criminal justice system as my brother cycled in and out of lock-ups from a young age. With a history of mental illness and substance use disorder, his behavior was regularly criminalized. My communitys solution for getting him off the streets was to lock him up, rather than provide an opportunity for medical intervention. Using detention facilities in this way not only harms individuals and their families but ultimately contributes to a cycle of poverty in our society which goes largely unchecked. In my work with Vera, I learned that county jails are often filled with people arrested on charges related to substance use (which often goes hand in hand with mental illness). If our work eventually contributes to a decline in this trend, it would benefit a lot of people like my brother.

The team at Vera: Terin Patel-Wilson, Sarah Minion (Vera Outreach Associate), Eital ... [+] Schattner-Elmaleh (Vera Data Scientist), James Wallace-Lee, Colin Adams.

Ashton elaborated on the experience of working with Vera and what they were able to achieve. It was humbling to work with an organization like Vera, which has been doing really important work in the criminal justice space for a long time. As volunteers, the other 11 Fellows and I were bringing our skills to the table, but most of us had never worked on this type of problem before. By working with the Vera team, we were able to build a tool to ingest anonymized up-to-date jail data to help surface trends and draw actionable insights for Vera to use in their work. This is meaningful because the most recent jail data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics is usually at least a couple of years old; which is eons in the dynamic environment of criminal justice reform. Gaps in data are a big issue for advocatesif you dont have data showing how jail populations are changing over time, its tough to convince anyone that things need to change. When you can point to data, you have a much more powerful tool for enacting change.

I asked Ashton what some of the key insights worth sharing were. The data revealed that there has been an overall increase in the nationwide jail population; an increase due to larger jail populations in rural counties as well as small and mid-sized metropolitan areas. For me, the most important thing to remember is that the majority of people in jail are pre-trial. This means that our local jails are primarily used to incarcerate legally innocent people. These are folks who have not been convicted of the charges they are facing; many of whom are being detained in civil matters, which can include people incarcerated pretrial for immigration cases, or for something as banal as unpaid fines and fees. The difference between being in jail and being free is often a question of what resources a person has available to them at the time.

Finally, I asked her whether this had sparked a desire in her to do more work in this field. Working alongside folks who have devoted their lives to this kind of work was incredibly rewarding and it has inspired me to do more. I am particularly passionate about the kinds of structural shifts that need to happen in order to welcome masses of people back into our communities as we continue the work of decarceration in the United States. These populations will need housing, access to work, and affordable health care, so Im hoping to continue to work on projects in the future which look to solve these kinds of problems. Ultimately, there is an important investment to be made in formerly incarcerated communities, so that these vast stores of human potential dont go untapped.

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How Google.Org Fellows Are Helping Use The Power Of Data For Criminal Justice Reform - Forbes