Making Data Accessible | Amy Bach

“You can’t change what you can’t see.” While Amy Bach spent a decade as a journalist in county courts, preparing to write her award-winning book, Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, those words came to her mind often. Most people experience the criminal legal system in the United States at the state level. But inconsistencies in the way data is collected, coded, and published across America’s 3,000-plus county legal systems made it virtually impossible for researchers, elected officials, and legal practitioners to track how the system was working.

To address this problem, Bach founded the nonprofit Measures for Justice (MFJ) in 2011. The organization collects, standardizes, and publicizes county-level data from across the country, ensuring that data is accessible and easy to understand. Bach has written about criminal-justice data and America’s legal system for publications including The Hill, The Nation, The New York Times, The American Lawyer, and New York Magazine. She is a member of the New York Bar and has been a professor of legal studies and criminal law.