For legal crusader Amy Bach, data is the key to holding America’s justice system accountable

Nearly 20 years ago, Amy Bach, a young lawyer and journalist, spent time in a courtroom in rural Georgia to write about routine injustices in the legal system. 

She watched as a public defender pleaded 48 of his clients guilty in a single day.

“He didn’t know their names or their faces or their cases. But he wasn’t a bad attorney,” she recalls. “The problem wasn’t one bad apple; it takes a system to create bad outcomes like this.”

Bach wrote about her experience for The Nation, and eventually published a 320-page exposé of the U.S. legal system titled “Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court.” The groundbreaking book was based on eight years of research and chronicled what she calls “an assembly-line approach” that rewards mediocrity, bypasses due process, and shortchanges both defendants and victims.

In 2011, a philanthropist inspired by the book gave Bach seed money to establish a nonprofit organization, Measures for Justice, which develops data tools and services that help communities reshape the criminal justice system. The nonprofit pushes for data transparency and accessibility. And for the accountability that ensues. 

“Data is key to helping policymakers and the public hold the criminal justice system accountable to its promises,” Bach says.

In 2013, Measures for Justice started out by proving that administrative data could be used to assess performance. The organization received a U.S. Department of Justice grant to develop a pilot program in Milwaukee County, later expanded to cover all of Wisconsin, to compile performance data from the state. Four years later, the organization launched its National Data Portal with data that spans the justice system, from arrest to post-conviction. 

Bach achieved a milestone in 2018 with the passage of Florida’s Criminal Justice Data Transparency Act, which requires officials in all of Florida’s 67 counties to submit information monthly to an online database on 28 core performance measures, ranging from the time to deposition in misdemeanor cases to the percentage of cases resulting in conviction.

Today, Measures for Justice has an annual budget of $17 million and employs 83 full-time staffers. They continue to be a key player in the movement to reshape the system with data.

“What we do is take data that’s used to track what’s going on in justice systems and we put it in a format everyone can understand,” Bach said.

But first, the organization addresses the problem of bad data, which is rampant. 

“It’s everywhere,” Bach said. “Missing data, incomplete data sets, data errors—these problems prevent courts, police, prosecutors and their communities from using data to assess system performance. This is why we help counties fix their data before anything else.”  

Measures for Justice recently launched two new products for county criminal justice agencies. The first is called Commons, a data platform that brings the public and their public servants together to look at local data and set joint policy goals as a result. The second is called Groundwork, which helps local agencies and offices assess and improve their data quality. 

Bach says police brutality is one of the most disturbing issues involving law enforcement today. She noted the recent case of Sonia Massey, 36, a Black woman who was shot to death in her own kitchen on July 6, 2024, by a Springfield, Illinois, police officer after she had called 911 to report a prowler.

“It’s atrocious what happened to her. But if you want to fix police brutality, you have to make hiring practices transparent—and see whether calls like this for mental health are being addressed properly,” Bach said. “Only then can you measure progress. Ongoing data collection and sharing is key to accountability and changing culture in the long term.”

The organization will be adding two new police sites in the spring of 2025, including Rochester, N.Y., where the organization is based and where she lived for nearly 20 years. 

Bach grew up in New York City and attended Stanford Law School, then clerked for a federal appellate judge in Miami before joining The Nation. She attributes her passion for justice in part to her Reform Jewish upbringing.

“Of course, there’s tikkun olam [repairing the world], but I also think there’s something about questioning the status quo. I have always cared deeply about making sure people are treated fairly, which is a cornerstone of Judaism,” she said. 

In recognition of her efforts, in 2018 Bach received the Charles Bronfman Prize, a $100,000 award given annually to a Jewish humanitarian under 50 whose innovative work has significantly improved the world. The prize was founded in 2004 by Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, together with their spouses, Andrew Hauptman and Claudine Blondin Bronfman, to honor their father, the businessman and philanthropist for whom the prize is named.

On September 24, as part of the Bronfman Prize’s 20th anniversary gala event in New York, Bach moderated a discussion titled “Young Global Leaders: The Challenge of Running a Social Justice Organization Today.” Participants included fellow Bronfman Prize laureates David Hertz, co-founder of the food justice organization Gastromotiva; Nik Kafka, founder and CEO of Teach a Man to Fish, which teaches entrepreneurialism to young people; and Jared Genser, founder of the international human rights group Freedom Now.