About Us
The Justice Education Project (JEP) is a youth-led organization working on the technology that decides criminal cases. Young analysts, working alongside legal and criminology scholars, research the risk scores, facial recognition, electronic monitoring, and digital evidence tools operating in American courts. That work becomes a policy agenda we build coalitions behind and carry to legislators at the state, federal, and international level.
Vision
The Justice Education Project follows the Proximate Analyst framework.
Building on Bryan Stevenson's argument that proximity to injustice produces better solutions, the Proximate Analyst framework holds that proximity should extend to authorship. When the people who will live under a system produce the analysis of it, the research gets sharper, the policy gets more accurate, and the reform lasts longer.
Gen Z is the first generation to come of age inside a justice system that is expanding its reach and automating its decisions at once, and almost none of the research shaping those systems is written by anyone who will live under them.
By building research capacity in young people and putting that work behind organized policy coalitions, JEP works toward a justice system in which the people it affects most have the power, standing, and tools to reshape it.
Our Theory of Change
Research That Meets the Standard
The Problem: Risk assessments, surveillance systems, and digital evidence tools get evaluated by the people who build and deploy them, using standards they set themselves. Almost none of that work asks what the tools do to the person on the other side of them, because the people evaluating have never been on that side.
Our Impact: We build the research itself, and we build it to a standard that holds up under legal and policy scrutiny. Young analysts work alongside scholars who sharpen the work and put their names behind it. JEP...
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Produces youth-authored research on the algorithmic and surveillance tools operating in American courts
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Pairs young researchers with scholars who sharpen the analysis and vouch for its rigor
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Publishes books, briefs, and original data with youth authorship on the byline
Coalitions That Move Policy
The Problem: Courts adopt new technology faster than anyone writes rules for it. There is no disclosure requirement, no validation standard, and no obligation to tell a defendant an algorithm was involved. The people those tools are used on have no standing in the decision, and young people in particular get invited to tell their stories and never to set the agenda.
Our Impact: We turn that research into demands, and we bring other organizations with us. Youth-authored analysis becomes specific legislative and administrative calls, backed by scholars and civil liberties organizations willing to put their names on them. JEP…
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Builds policy platforms that translate youth-authored research into concrete legislative calls
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Convenes coalitions of scholars, civil liberties organizations, and defenders behind shared demands
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Carries youth-authored analysis into state, federal, and international policy proceedings