One group of criminal justice actors makes the decisions that have an outsized effect on rising incarceration rates in America: local prosecutors. 87% of America’s prisoners are prosecuted at the local level. Local prosecutors make the decisions of who to charge, what charges to bring, whether to seek pretrial detention, what plea bargains to offer, and what sentences to recommend. Their decisions, more than any other criminal justice actor, determine who is incarcerated and for how long.

Yet, in most jurisdictions, prosecutors still make most of these crucial decisions based on “gut” and personal experience, rather than on data or clear guidelines. These decisions – often affected by implicit bias and structural inequalities – overwhelmingly and disproportionately affect lower-income and minority communities and lead to unnecessary and prolonged incarceration. The decisions of prosecutors have been a key driver in the rise in longer sentences, without appreciable gains in community safety or “justice.”

Data addressing how and why prosecutors make key decisions remain, almost uniformly, unavailable to researchers and the public. The Beeck Center’s Data + Justice project aims to open this data to the public and support the effort to understand how prosecutors make decisions in order to inform fairer and more just results. Such an endeavor is key to creating justice and reform in our legal system.