Female Disruptors: Amy Bach of Measures for Justice On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Shrink the change. This is from the Heath brothers’ book Switch. When people face a daunting task and their instinct is to avoid it, you’ve got to break down the task. Shrink the change. In other words: Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Amy Bach.
Amy Bach has been the Chief Executive Officer of Measures for Justice since 2011. She founded the organization as a follow-up to her acclaimed book, Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, which won the 2010 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. In June 2011, Echoing Green, a premier seed investor for social entrepreneurs, selected Amy as a Fellow out of 3,000 candidates worldwide to support the launch of Measures for Justice. Following that, she was named a Draper Richards Kaplan Social Entrepreneur. For her work on Ordinary Injustice, Amy received a Soros Media Fellowship, a special J. Anthony Lukas citation, and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University. Amy was a Knight Foundation Journalism Fellow at Yale Law School and is a graduate of Stanford Law School. In 2012, she taught Criminal Law during the spring semester at the University of Buffalo Law School as a Visiting Professor. In 2019, she won the Academy of Criminal Justice Science’s Leadership and Innovation Award and the Charles Bronfman Prize. Amy lives in Rochester, NY, where the organization is based.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I went to law school, clerked for a federal judge, and then spent eight years writing a book about criminal trial courts in America. I saw how legal professionals could make the same mistakes over and over. And not realize that anything is missing. Like the public defender who pleaded 48 people guilty in a little over a day. And barely knew their names, much less their cases. Or the prosecutor who had no idea he had not prosecuted a domestic violence case in 21 years. My idea was to measure the delivery of basic legal services. So that everyone could see patterns and then improve their systems. To reach into the heart of courts across America and ask: How are we doing? So that counties could have a yardstick to see how they compare. And the tools to reshape our judicial system via data and hard conversations with communities.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Pretty much everything! When we got started a little over ten years ago, almost no one was doing this work. No one was talking about the importance of data or performance measurement. It was too hard, it couldn’t be done, don’t even try. That was the message out there at the time. But we pressed on because it was so obvious to me that we can’t change what we can’t see. And we were seeing nothing.
Fast forward a decade and the culture has changed. We’ve been leading this movement to upend how justice gets done in this country by bringing to the table transparency and accountability via data. We’ve worked to develop national data standards and measures. We’ve unlocked 1/3rd of the country’s data in more than 1200 counties. And now we’re bringing new data platforms to police departments and DA offices that depend on real, sustained collaboration between these agencies and departments and the people they serve. When data and collaboration are the centerpiece of how criminal justice gets carried out, transparency and accountability become the norm. Which amounts to more than disruption–it’s a revolution.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One day I had a meeting in a room with a judge who was supposedly really into data. We showed him some of the initial data that suggested his county had fared quite well with few racial disparities.
“You can’t compare counties,” said the judge.
“Why not?”
“It’s not possible,” he said.
“Don’t all the counties in the state have the same laws? Why can’t you compare two counties?”
“One county is an apple and one’s an orange.”
“Well why can’t you compare an apple and an orange? One is orange and bumpy and one is red and smooth.”
“But I don’t want a tomato in my fruit salad.”
I don’t remember what he said next. I ran over to try and shake his hand. He looked down at my hand. He left me hanging. His legal assistant looked at me with disgust.
What I didn’t understand at the time was how little prepared everyone was for publicly comparable data. But his saying he didn’t want a tomato in his fruit salad really became a metaphor in my head for: Get out of my state.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
So many people have helped me. I am indebted to many of our Board members who guided us and helped us grow. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our Board Chair who died this year. Ed Schallert was chair of the Debevoise & Plimpton’s Litigation Department. He clerked for Thurgood Marshall. He gave me a lot of faith that when things were hard, they were just the growing pains every organization has to go through. And he did it in a way that didn’t make me feel judged. At his memorial service I learned that I was not the only one — there were a dozen or so people at his firm who said he mentored them and did it in a funny, honest way. I hope to pass that on one day.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
That is a great question. Social media might be a good example. It’s obviously made it possible for many more people to tell their stories. And create relationships with each other. But the relationships are often superficial, and the lack of depth there can and has led to a lot of isolation and loneliness — feelings Hannah Arendt calls the preconditions for tyranny. People need a public square where they can have real interactions. And be drawn into real conversations over facts. That is why I love our work so much: we bring data and facts to places that are often tinderboxed or fractured. People have hard conversations and set data driven goals that generate accountability.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Shrink the change. This is from the Heath brothers’ book Switch. When people face a daunting task and their instinct is to avoid it, you’ve got to break down the task. Shrink the change. In other words: Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory.
- “I am in charge of the butter.” This quote comes from a story one of my board members told me. It’s about a politician who once bragged relentlessly about everything he was in charge of while attending some dinner. But when he asked a waiter for butter, the waiter wouldn’t give it to him. “I am in charge of the butter,” the waiter said. Which just goes to prove that the guy who seems like he has no power can always block you. So don’t be a jerk.
- Get a bookkeeper. When we first began I tried to write all the checks myself and it would take forever. I got a bookkeeper and an accountant. It’s a metaphor: You need to have your house in order to be creative. It’s true for the whole organization, really.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
You’re right, we are just getting started. We plan to bring our newest data platform, Commons, to a large portion of the population. What Commons does is publish recent data people really want alongside policy goals set by local law enforcement and the public they serve. These goals are shared and tracked in service of real transparency and accountability. Which we anticipate will lead to greater demands nationwide for more of same. Which will necessarily lead to better infrastructure, mandates, and legislation to make live data streams just a regular part of how justice gets done in this country. That is the vision.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Women have to create tracks and then be willing to jump from track to track. I have a large number of women in my organization who are the breadwinners for their families–as spouses or single moms. One woman on my team was writing to me while on a plane to her grandfather’s funeral about a work document, saying she felt better working than not. This is our reality: We multitask more. We love what we do. And trust we will get it all done at the same time.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
I always think about Simple Justice by Richard Kluger. It tells the story of Brown v. Board of Education that saw the US Supreme Court reverse a long-standing precedent of separate but equal held in Plessy v. Ferguson. How did this monumental change occur in such a glacially paced court? The NAACP used data in its early strategies to show separate is not equal–e.g., how much money Black teachers were paid compared to white teachers. This paved the way to Brown and primed the court to rely on data to make its decisions. So that in the end, the Court zeroed in on data from the “the doll tests,” which demonstrated the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children, to make its choice. Incremental change paved the way for lasting change. And all of it hinged on reliable data.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I’m lucky to be able to say, honestly, that the movement Measures for Justice has already started to make the criminal justice system fully transparent, accountable, and accessible stands to change millions of lives over time.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
There is a very famous saying from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of our Fathers): “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” This incremental approach means that the goal cannot be reached in one generation. Each generation will improve the world as much as it can. Then the mission must be passed on to the next generation, until the goal is reached. It’s arrogant to think otherwise.
How can our readers follow you online?
None of what I do is about me–it’s about the work. So follow us here, here, and here.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Amy Bach of Measures for Justice On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.