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Data: Are We Analyzing It or Becoming It?
A data storyteller’s confrontation with humanity and technology
Four years back, one of my colleagues requested that I join his team for a Call for Code challenge. This challenge is for techies, especially developers and programmers, who build open-source projects that help to make a difference in society. Although I was more interested in the technical part of the challenge, I realized later that the challenge was for a more significant cause: a call for a code for Racial justice.
Our team was required to build any product related to the theme “Systemic Racism and Judiciary Reform.” The challenge was more of an opportunity to use my coding skills to implement something with the latest technological components, which I have learned but have yet to find a space to apply then.
At the end of the challenge, we managed to roll out our product to our customers, primarily Judiciary officials, lawyers, Judges, and NGOs. The product, Open Sentencing Model, is a web application that helps public defenders reduce the sentencing of people impacted by bias and racism. As a data engineer and backend developer, I identified, collected, and analyzed historical judiciary data in the public domain.
I found numerous harsh truths in the ground reality about the trends and patterns of the people who were facing systemic racism. People in the Black Community have faced harsher downstream effects (charged at higher rates, assigned more significant charges, convicted at higher rates, given longer sentences, and denied parole more often) than people of other races for similar offenses. This systemic bias in the justice system has a profound and lasting impact on black families, communities, and the country.
The Open Sentencing solution helped public attorneys expose bias and empowered public defenders to address racial disparities in the judicial system. The product has a pre-trained Bias and disparity Detection Engine that analyzes fact patterns and rapidly provides statistical analysis highlighting deviations from race guidelines throughout an accused person’s judiciary process. The product also generates a report that provides clear insights for the public defender to defend against detected bias, ultimately and ideally reasonably reducing incarceration for members of the…
