OKPOLICY.ORG
For Immediate Release
Oklahoma Policy Institute is excited to launch a new project to improve understanding of Oklahoma’s justice system through analysis of public data. Working closely with justice system stakeholders and advocates, Open Justice Oklahoma (OJO) will use cutting-edge methods to identify problems, craft solutions, and measure reform outcomes.
The project will be led by Ryan Gentzler, who has been a criminal justice analyst with Oklahoma Policy Institute for the past two years. OK Policy is also hiring a justice data analyst to work with the project, with an application deadline of August 3rd.
“Oklahoma now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, but we still don’t have much understanding of what brought us to this point, much less what it would take to reverse it,” Gentzler said. “Our goal with OJO is to uncover those trends and provide all Oklahomans with a more complete understanding of how our justice system operates, so that Oklahoma can efficiently reduce crime, improve rehabilitation, and save tax dollars.”
OJO will build on OK Policy’s successful projects using justice system data. Past examples of this work include mapping geographic disparities in the burden of court fines and fees, tracing how court costs and failure to pay warrants are creating debtors’ prisons, and tracking the impact of varied domestic violence charging practices in Oklahoma County and Tulsa County.
The project is primarily funded by grants from FWD.us and the George Kaiser Family Foundation.
“We’re grateful to those foundations and all of the individual donors who recognize the value of OK Policy’s research and whose investment allows us to pursue this exciting expansion of our work,” said David Blatt, Oklahoma Policy Institute’s Executive Director.
For more information about OJO and to subscribe to email updates about the project, go to https://openjustice.okpolicy.org.
