Brennan Klein

Sponsor: RWJF (Robert Wood Johnson)

From Searchlights to Floodlights: Expanding the Scope and Impact of Criminal Municipal Court Data

Criminal municipal courts in the US are standalone courts that operate under the purview of municipalities and cities, as opposed to state judiciaries. They are largely thought to be the “lowest” tier of the criminal legal system, usually processing misdemeanors or local ordinance violations. They are also relatively under-studied as an institution and often operate in ways that perpetuate unequal or biased outcomes. The general public has little sense of the volume of cases being tried in the system, the amount of money collected by municipalities through fines and fees, and even the number of courts in a given state. In this grant, we take a system-wide approach in collecting, digitizing, and visualizing longitudinal data on every criminal municipal court in every state where they operate. In addition to analyzing, visualizing, and summarizing this massive dataset, we will produce a suite of policy recommendations designed to improve a system that too often contributes to injustice in our criminal legal system.