By Beth Schwartzapfel
The Marshall Project
May 23, 2017
This week the nonprofit Measures for Justice is launching an online tool meant to shine a high beam into these dark corners.
It is gathering numbers from key criminal justice players — prosecutors offices, public defenders, courts, probation departments — in each of America’s more than 3,000 counties. Staffers clean the data, assemble it in an apples-to-apples format, use it to answer a standard set of basic questions, and make the results free and easy to access and understand.