SCALES awarded NSF grant to build the Integrated Justice Platform Proto-OKN

We’re excited to announce that SCALES has been award a NSF grant to build the Integrated Justice Platform Proto-OKN over the next three years. The goal of the Integrated Justice Platform is to address the dearth of accessible information about who is prosecuted and convicted and what kinds of ultimate outcomes they experience. For a country that has the largest criminal justice system in the world, resolving over 18 million criminal cases each year, the lack of nationally-accessible and linked data available across the United States hinders policymaking and understanding of the criminal justice system.

This Prototype-Open Knowledge Network project on an integrated platform to connect criminal justice data across data silos seeks to establish an integrated knowledge network as the data infrastructure for making necessary connections across data systems within the criminal justice system. This platform will help improve the collective knowledge of criminal justice functioning and outcomes. It will also help in the evaluation of the influence of any bias in the system, and in the evaluation of other extralegal factors, such as the social determinants of crime. Correlating the aggregated response of the criminal justice system to crime is essential to reveal inequities and inefficiencies in the administration of justice. The knowledge network will also help advance the science of knowledge networks.

This effort and proposal arose from the National Science Foundation design sprint. Over a months-long process, a group emerged based around the use case that was championed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the outset of the sprint. Our final efforts to describe the genesis of the Proto-OKN idea can be found in the Open Knowledge Network Roadmap report.

We’re excited to leverage and grow the existing SCALES OKN software and tools to tackle this problem, as well as growing our community of partners and users that will leverage this data. If you’re interested in being a part of the team please reach out to us.