An award-winning educator and researcher recognized by the National Academy of Sciences, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, he has authored numerous studies at the intersection of data science, social justice, and public policy. His opinion pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Inside Higher Ed, and other publications.
Topaz applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, and shared the following:
Page 99 of Unlocking Justice distinguishes jails from prisons. Jails are short-term holding places, high-turnover and sparse on programming. Prisons hold people convicted of serious crimes and, at least in theory, offer more rehabilitation. From there, the page turns to Rikers Island, New York City's infamous jail complex, long associated with violence, neglect, and official failure. It begins a section called "A Brief History of Terrible Things" and warns the reader that the material ahead is hard to read.Visit Chad M. Topaz's website.
Does the Page 99 Test work? Mostly. A reader who opened to page 99 would meet one of the book's central concerns, which is what powerful systems do to people when the public is not looking. The page is not abstract. It is about a place, a history, and people trapped inside an institution that has somehow survived scandal after scandal.
But page 99 would mislead in two ways. First, Unlocking Justice is not only a book about harm. It is a book about data. Court records, public-records requests, jail data, sentencing data, risk-assessment algorithms. Page 99 starts to move toward why the work matters. It does not show how the work is done.
Second, the page is much darker and more solemn than the book as a whole. The book spends real time with violence, secrecy, and racial disparity. It has to. But it is also, in places, funny, and it is, above all, hopeful. And although it is a book about data, it is not a technical book. You do not have to love numbers, or even like them, to follow it. Its argument is that data is not just for experts and institutions. It is for residents, organizers, students, journalists, and anyone willing to ask what the numbers show.
Unlocking Justice walks through the criminal legal system. A rural New England town with a portrait of Hitler in the police station, which became the starting point for an investigation of racial bias in policing. Public judicial records that, once pried loose, named the New York City judges setting bail at disproportionate rates. Florida's COMPAS algorithm, which I examined for the inequity buried in its risk scores. And more. Again and again, the institutions with the most power over people's lives are the ones working hardest to keep their data out of view. The point of the book is that people can force that view open, and use it to demand transparency, accountability, and justice.
--Marshal Zeringue
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