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

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

“He didn’t know their names or their faces or their cases. But he was not a bad lawyer,” she recalls. “The problem was not a bad apple; it takes a system to create bad results like this.”

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

In 2011, a philanthropist inspired by the book gave Bach seed money to start a nonprofit organization, Measures for Justicewhich develops tools and data services that help communities reshape the criminal justice system. The nonprofit strives for data transparency and accessibility. And for the responsibility that follows.

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

In 2013, Measures for Justice began by demonstrating that administrative data could be used to assess performance. The organization received a US 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 covering the justice system from arrest to post-conviction.

Bach reached a milestone in 2018 with the passage of the Florida Criminal Justice Data Transparency Act, which requires officials in all 67 Florida counties to submit monthly information to an online database on 28 measures baseline performance, from the time of filing in misdemeanor cases to the percentage of cases that resulted in conviction.

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

“What we’re doing is taking data that’s used to track what’s going on in justice systems and putting it into a format that everybody can understand,” Bach said.

But first, the organization tackles the problem of bad data, which is widespread.

“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. That’s 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 the Commons, a data platform that brings together the public and their public officials to analyze local data and, as a result, set common policy goals. 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 troubling issues involving law enforcement today. She noted the recent case of Sonia Massey, 36, a black woman who was shot in her own kitchen on July 6, 2024, by a police officer in Springfield, Illinois, after calling 911 to to report a prowler.

“It’s atrocious what happened to her. But if you want to fix police brutality, you need to make hiring practices transparent and see if these kinds of mental health calls are properly addressed,” Bach said. “Only then can you measure progress. Ongoing data collection and sharing is essential for long-term accountability and culture change.”

The organization will add two new police sites in the spring of 2025, including Rochester, NY, where the organization is headquartered and has lived for nearly 20 years.

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

“Of course there is tikkun olam (repairing the world), but I think there is also 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 his efforts, in 2018 Bach received Charles Bronfman Awarda $100,000 award given annually to a Jewish humanitarian under the age of 50 whose innovative work has significantly improved the world. The award was founded in 2004 by Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, along with their spouses, Andrew Hauptman and Claudine Blondin Bronfman, to honor their father, the businessman and philanthropist for whom the award is named.

On September 24, as part of the Bronfman Prize 20th Anniversary Gala event in New York, Bach moderated a discussion titled “Young Global Leaders: The Challenge of Running a Social Justice Organization Today.” Among the participants are fellow Bronfman Award winners David Hertzco-founder of the food justice organization Gastromotiva; Nick Kafkafounder and CEO of Teach a Man to Fish, which teaches entrepreneurship to young people; and Jared Genserfounder of the international human rights group Freedom Now.