Using Data to Ensure Fairness in the Justice System
When Samantha Levinson arrived at the Dietrich School, she knew one thing for certain: she wasn't sure what she wanted to be when she grew up.
"I just came in and said: ‘Let me replicate the diversity of classes that I really enjoyed in high school and see where that takes me," says Levinson.
That openness to exploration led Levinson through a uniquely diverse set of coursework. She double-majored in French and economics, minored in History, and earned certificates in Gender Studies, Western European Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies. For Levinson, this collection of studies were simply different lenses for understanding the same essential questions.
"It's just different ways to understand our world and the way that people fit into the society and the systems that we create," Levinson explains.
At Pitt, Levinson deepened her understanding of how culture, policy, and system-level factors impact individual people, and how those people can impact and be governed by the structures, systems, and cultures they exist within. A pivotal moment came during her freshman summer when Levinson received a Brackenridge Research Fellowship to conduct translation studies research. She spent the summer reading three versions of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex – the original French version and two English translations – to understand how translation choices affect the transmission of philosophical ideas.
"The policy sections get pretty messed up by both translations, because the people who were chosen to translate them didn't have all the necessary qualifications to be able to understand the philosophical implications of the work," Levinson offers. "I realized that those issues that Simone de Beauvoir was talking about, and that the translators were trying to capture, still exist today. They haven't been solved. And frankly, no perfect translation would have solved them."
She found herself wondering: "Do I want to spend my life talking about some very specific thing, or is there a way that I can go out in the world and take action on these issues that are clearly still a problem?"
The answer came during Levinson’s experience in the Browne Leadership Fellows Program in the School of Social Work, which brought non-social work students into community-based nonprofit environments. Through the fellowship, Levinson met her research mentor, Dr. Ray Engel. Engel helped Levinson realize she could combine research with action.
“The Browne Fellowship opened up my mind to this intersection that exists, where you can be taking an analytic or a more research-oriented perspective, a data and evidence-based perspective, but you can apply it in the service of helping people today," says Levinson. “Working with Dr. Engel was an experience that really started to open my eyes to what public policy was, and also what data-informed work could look like in these spaces that are really focused on improving people's lives."
Levinson continues to draw from her experiences at Pitt in her current role as the Director of Program Innovation and Client Experience at The Bail Project, an organization that pays bail for people who cannot afford it. Her economics background enables her to handle the mathematical analysis her current work requires, and her exposure to diverse frameworks and perspectives has made her an effective translator across departments and stakeholder groups.
The Bail Project’s mission is rooted in the principle that, rich or poor, everyone is entitled to equal justice in the United States. But cash bail creates a two-tiered system--one for people with money and one for everyone else.
"There are people sitting in jails across the United States that are only there because they don't have the money to pay bail," Levinson says. "Their counterparts who are accused of the same crimes but who have more money or are in communities with more resources have their lives back. They're back at home, they still have their job, they can still see their kids, they can still feed their pets. They are being treated as innocent, which is the way our country's legal system is supposed to work."
The Bail Project pays bail for those in need while simultaneously working to reform the system at a higher level. "We want to take money out of justice so that people don't need us," says Levinson. "Our mission is to create a fairer system, one that truly treats people as innocent until proven otherwise."
In her role, Levinson bridges the data team and the organization's operations team, the ones who bail people out and support them through their cases. She ensures consistent, high-quality service delivery across all locations while collecting data that demonstrates the efficacy of their work and advances broader systems-change initiatives. Their data tell a powerful story that challenges common assumptions about bail.
"The argument is that bail is necessary for people to return to court—that if you put up money, you're more likely to come back because you want your money back," Levinson notes. However, The Bail Project's data show that more than 90% of their clients return to court, even with no money on the line.
Says Levinson,"People want to go back to court. Most people don't want to live in fear of the justice system. They want to resolve their case and move on with their lives. Often, people just have barriers that they need help resolving, like they don't understand the court docket well enough (and I urge anybody to look at a court docket and see if you understand it) or they face barriers like transportation that just make it difficult for them to get back to court."
Collecting these kinds of data provides insight into what support people actually need to successfully navigate the court system without the need for cash bail.
"We're in a position to learn what works most effectively and efficiently," Levinson says. "That's helpful for us in the service of clients, but it's also helpful when we think about the broader sphere of people doing this type of work today."
Looking ahead, Levinson remains committed to the fundamental principles she discovered at Pitt.
"I'm very passionate about using data to improve systems that negatively impact vulnerable and low-income people," says Levinson. "There's so much work to be done to ensure that as a nation, we are supporting our most vulnerable people, and that we are creating sustainable ways to help people succeed, instead of throwing more barriers in people's paths."
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