Pro-DATA

Pro-DATA is a free resource cre­at­ed by the Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion to sup­port data-dri­ven deci­sion-mak­ing and data trans­paren­cy in youth jus­tice at the local and state lev­els. This online tool is open to all juris­dic­tions by request.

Pro-DATA is an appli­ca­tion for juris­dic­tions to gath­er and visu­al­ize their youth jus­tice data on more than 100 mea­sures, with the option to add unlim­it­ed addi­tion­al mea­sures to address local pri­or­i­ties. The application’s chart-mak­ing capa­bil­i­ty helps users iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment and track what inter­ven­tions work — and don’t work, and for which groups of youth. The dash­board lets users see pat­terns for all youth and then dive deep­er into pat­terns by race and eth­nic­i­ty, among oth­er char­ac­ter­is­tics. With­out the deep­er dive, stake­hold­ers might miss that racial groups fre­quent­ly have dif­fer­ent out­comes, often with stronger gains for white youth than youth of color.

With the tool, users can eas­i­ly visu­al­ize trends and mon­i­tor whether trend lines are mov­ing in the right direc­tion, and, if not, what actions may make a dif­fer­ence. Pro-DATA also allows juris­dic­tions to com­pare their own data to oth­ers. Note, the data is self-report­ed by state and local agen­cies, apart from pop­u­la­tion data, which is U.S. Cen­sus Bureau data pro­vid­ed by the fed­er­al Office of Juve­nile Jus­tice and Delin­quen­cy Prevention.

The data dash­board allows users to ana­lyze their own jurisdiction’s data in mul­ti­ple ways, includ­ing trends over time, trends by race, dis­tri­b­u­tions and racial dis­par­i­ties across key deci­sion points. See fig­ure 1 for an exam­ple. It indi­cates dis­par­i­ties between Black youth and white youth at key deci­sion points (refer­rals, for­mal fil­ings, pro­ba­tion, tech­ni­cal vio­la­tions of pro­ba­tion and com­mit­ments to state facil­i­ties) for a sin­gle juris­dic­tion in 2022.

The dash­board also offers sev­er­al ways for users to see their own jurisdiction’s data in rela­tion to oth­ers using the tool, with oth­er juris­dic­tions anonymized and labeled as Site A, Site B, etc. Fig­ure 2 shows the change in the num­ber of refer­rals to juve­nile court from 2019 to 2022. The visu­al includes all juris­dic­tions who have entered refer­ral data for 2019 and 2022, along with a hypo­thet­i­cal juris­dic­tion labelled ​“User’s Site” for illustration.

Apply for Your Juris­dic­tion to Use Pro-DATA

The Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion encour­ages juris­dic­tions to share access to Pro-DATA with a broad array of stake­hold­ers to advance trans­paren­cy and part­ner­ship. The aspi­ra­tion is that ​“DATA” in Pro-DATA sig­ni­fies Data Acces­si­ble to All — mean­ing the range of local stake­hold­ers involved in young peo­ples’ long-term suc­cess, includ­ing pro­ba­tion offi­cers and oth­er jus­tice sys­tem lead­ers and staff, com­mu­ni­ties most affect­ed by the jus­tice sys­tem, young peo­ple with expe­ri­ence nav­i­gat­ing the juve­nile jus­tice sys­tem and their fam­i­ly mem­bers; and oth­er advo­cates for the long-term suc­cess of young peo­ple exposed to the legal system.

Inter­est­ed youth jus­tice agen­cies should fol­low the link below to cre­ate an account and begin using the dash­board. To sub­mit an appli­ca­tion, the juris­dic­tion will need to iden­ti­fy at least one sys­tem leader to be an ini­tial account hold­ers. After an account has been estab­lished, the juris­dic­tion could add an unlim­it­ed num­ber of addi­tion­al users. View a list of all juris­dic­tions present­ly using Pro-DATA.

Apply for Your Juris­dic­tion to Use Pro-DATA

How to Log On to Pro-DATA

If you already are a reg­is­tered user or have been invit­ed to reg­is­ter by a par­tic­i­pat­ing juris­dic­tion, vis­it the Pro-DATA web­site.