Measures for Justice‹ Back to Lessons Learned
'Big bet' philanthropy is smart bet philanthropy
Amy Bach
Executive Director and President
United States
Mission
Measures for Justice (MFJ) was founded in 2011 to develop a data-driven set of performance measures to assess and compare the criminal justice process from arrest to post-conviction on a county-by-county basis. The data set comprises measures that address three broad categories: Fiscal Responsibility, Fair Process, and Public Safety.
MFJ’s mission is o use data to measure and understand county-level criminal justice system performance.
Measures for Justice aims to fix systemic problems in the criminal justice system by shining a light on criminal justice ‘performance’ through county-level comparative data. In 2014 PSF made a $3 million bet on a $1 million organization founded by Amy Bach, an Echoing Green Fellow. MFJ has cleaned and coded data from 300 counties across six states, and launched a data portal in the spring of 2017. MFJ has grown from two employees to 30, and has used PSF’s initial funding to leverage an additional $13 million in support, most recently from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Google.org, MacArthur Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.