The Justice Innovation Lab (JIL) is a nonprofit organization that works to create a more equitable, effective, and fair criminal justice system by developing and implementing data-informed, community-centered solutions. JIL collaborates with prosecutors, judges, police departments, health agencies, and community organizations to drive meaningful reform and reduce harmful outcomes such as unnecessary incarceration and unjust racial and economic disparities. Their approach combines data analysis, human-centered design, and targeted training to drive positive systemic change.
A fundamental part of JIL’s work is helping partners evaluate the real-world effects of prosecution policies. By designing and analyzing rigorous studies, including randomized controlled trials (RCTs), JIL supports the development of policies that are both effective and accountable. To promote transparency and reproducibility in these efforts, the team integrates the Open Science Framework (OSF) into its workflow. We spoke with Rory Pulvino, JIL’s Chief Implementation Officer, about how the OSF supports the organization’s mission to improve policymaking through open, credible, and collaborative research.
Q: For those who are not already familiar, can you tell us about the mission of the Justice Innovation Lab and the work that you do?
A: Justice Innovation Lab is a research focused nonprofit that aims to grow the evidence of justice practices that actually improve fairness and public-safety. The criminal justice space, in particular prosecutor’s offices, lacks solid evidence of how their work affects the communities they serve. We look to fill that gap by partnering with prosecutor offices around the country to analyze changes to office policy.
When working with these offices, we look to conduct the most rigorous research possible. Our analysis covers both already implemented policies, as well as helping offices to design new policies with a research component to understand impact.
Q: What led the Justice Innovation Lab to begin using OSF? Was there a specific problem or need that you were hoping to address?
A: We aim to conduct the most rigorous research possible in the prosecution policy space. Prosecutor offices across the country are our audience, and in order to change policy, we need the strongest evidence possible as to the impact of the policies we assess. As such, we began using OSF to pre-register our analyses for various policies and to expose our research to the larger social science community for review and critique.
Q: How has your team integrated OSF into your workflow? Which of the platform’s features have proven most valuable for your work?
A: We have partially integrated OSF into our workflow. We register our RCTs in OSF and link experiments with our GitHub repositories. Pre-registration is the most valuable part of the platform for us as at this point.
Q: Can you share how OSF improves or enhances your team's collaboration and data management capabilities?
A: OSF allows us to more easily share pre-registration plans and to link together different resources like GitHub repositories. Because not all of our collaborators are allowed to access GitHub and our data, OSF is helpful for isolating user access based on need and sharing our results.
Q: Are there any current projects or initiatives at JIL that you'd like to highlight?
A: We have one project regarding the impact of a change in prosecutorial process to triage cases that we plan to make public on OSF later this year. The project was an RCT examining the impact of a screening prosecutor on the time to resolve criminal cases, especially those dismissed for insufficient evidence.
