“I left Stanford thinking that I would be a professional circus performer,” says Clementine Jacoby, who graduated from Stanford in 2015 with a degree in software engineering. Interestingly, Jacoby spent her first year after graduation teaching acrobatics in a Brazilian gang diversion program. During that time, Jacoby witnessed the flaws of the criminal justice system in Brazil, which disproportionately targeted citizens of lower socioeconomic status and often imprisoned those who committed petty crimes with excessive sentences. At the time, Jacoby did not realize that her experience would become the foundation needed for a company that advocates for criminal justice reform here in the United States.

More than 2 million people remain incarcerated in the United States, and among those in prison, experts say thousands of them don’t pose a public-safety threat. The problem? The data that allows them to be released is backlogged because it is spread out among different departments.

That’s why in 2019, Jacoby created Recidiviz, a nonprofit that works with more than 30 states to consolidate key data points of prisons around the country, such as whether an incarcerated person has shown progress by completing a treatment plan or how well equipped a correction facility can handle a COVID-19 outbreak.

Although no algorithm is perfect and there is not one solution that can solve the criminal-justice system problem alone, Recidiviz demonstrates early signs of success. To date, Recidiviz has released nearly 44,000 inmates in 34 states. Despite her young age of 29, Clementine Jacoby is changing the way our country views the criminal justice system. It’s giving those who deserve another chance, a second chance beyond the bars.

To read Clementine’s feature in Forbes 30 Under 30, 

click on the link below!

Clementine Jacoby (forbes.com)