Clementine Jacoby | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Employer(s) | Google Recidiviz |
Clementine Jacoby is an American software engineer and criminal justice reform activist. She is a founder and executive director at Recidiviz. She was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2021 and named as a TED fellow in 2022.
Jacoby was a student at Stanford University, where she studied symbolic systems. [1] She spent one year of her studies in a circus in Brazil, where she taught acrobatics to gang members. [2] This experience prompted her to carefully evaluate the criminal justice system. [2] She worked at OPower, a platform which helped people make better decisions about their energy usage using behavioral economics. [1]
Jacoby joined Google where she worked on augmented mobile games. [2] [3] She became increasingly concerned about the high numbers of people imprisoned in the United States. [4] [5] In particular, she looked for low-cost solutions to mass incarceration. [6] Of the 2.5 million incarcerated Americans, hundreds of thousands pose no risk to public safety. One in four prison admissions occur not because someone committed a crime but because they violated rules whilst on supervision. [7] However, the data required to free them from prison is often distributed across several departments. Jacoby's work looks to make real-time data available for justice agencies and, ultimately, reduce recidivism. [1]
Jacoby is the Founder and executive director of Recidiviz, [2] [8] a nonprofit platform that allows states to collect, clean, standardize and share fragmented data. [7] [9] It collects data from prisons, probation and parole. Recidiviz makes use of an algorithm to recommend people for early release, so-called smart decarceration. [2] In the two years following its launch, Recidiviz was responsible for the release of over 40,000 inmates. [4]
As COVID-19 spread through prison populations, [10] North Dakota made use of Recidiviz to identify inmates who were eligible for release. In one month, prison populations in North Dakota were reduced by 25%. [11] Jacoby partnered with the Charles Koch Institute to expand Recidiviz to 15 states. [2]