| Clementine Jacoby | |
| Alma Mater: | Stanford University |
| Employer: | Google Recidiviz |
Clementine Jacoby is an American software engineer and criminal justice reform activist. She is a founder and executive director at Recidiviz. She was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2021 and named as a TED fellow in 2022.
Jacoby was a student at Stanford University, where she studied symbolic systems.[1] She spent one year of her studies in a circus in Brazil, where she taught acrobatics to gang members.[2] This experience prompted her to carefully evaluate the criminal justice system. She worked at OPower, a platform which helped people make better decisions about their energy usage using behavioral economics.
Jacoby joined Google where she worked on augmented mobile games.[3] She became increasingly concerned about the high numbers of people imprisoned in the United States.[4] [5] In particular, she looked for low-cost solutions to mass incarceration.[6] Of the 2.5 million incarcerated Americans, hundreds of thousands pose no risk to public safety. One in four prison admissions occur not because someone committed a crime but because they violated rules whilst on supervision.[7] However, the data required to free them from prison is often distributed across several departments. Jacoby's work looks to make real-time data available for justice agencies and, ultimately, reduce recidivism.
Jacoby is the Founder and executive director of Recidiviz,[8] a nonprofit platform that allows states to collect, clean, standardize and share fragmented data.[9] It collects data from prisons, probation and parole. Recidiviz makes use of an algorithm to recommend people for early release, so-called smart decarceration. In the two years following its launch, Recidiviz was responsible for the release of over 40,000 inmates.
As COVID-19 spread through prison populations,[10] North Dakota made use of Recidiviz to identify inmates who were eligible for release. In one month, prison populations in North Dakota were reduced by 25%.[11] Jacoby partnered with the Charles Koch Institute to expand Recidiviz to 15 states.