Second Internship at Recidiviz

SUMMER 2024, NYC

BACKGROUND

Recidiviz is a non-profit that partners with state criminal justice agencies to advance their use of data and reduce incarceration. I interned for Recidiviz for the first time in February of 2023, and for the second time in the summer of 2024.

During this second internship, I helped them expand into yet a new area: designing a website (called Opportunities) for imprisoned people to give them information about work release and parole programs.

My task was to determine how incarcerated people conceptualize and navigate opportunities available to them in prison. I needed to gain an understanding of this process by interviewing formerly incarcerated people.

OUTCOMES

I interviewed the formerly incarcerated founder and employees of FreeWorld, a nonprofit dedicated to helping recently freed people find employment. I used these insights to develop recommendations for the next version of the Opportunities website to maximize its utility to incarcerated people.

I then designed a new page of the Opportunities website called the Finances Visualizer that helps incarcerated people visualize the often unintuitive monetary costs and income sources of work release and parole programs.

Insights and recommendations for the website based on the interviews I conducted

Screens from the Finances Visualizer tool for incarcerated people I designed. These screens give the user a personalized breakdown of their income sources and costs while imprisoned. They also offer a projection of the user's predicted net income upon release. This information will help users decide which programs (such as work release or parole) make the most financial sense for them to pursue.

This is a Figma prototype for the Finances Visualizer tool. Click “Start here” in the Flows box, and then click anywhere on the prototype to highlight interactive elements in blue.

IMPACT

The Recidiviz design team is implementing the insights from this research into the second version of the Opportunities website. The second version lists more program options than the first version, so my research into how incarcerated people decide between different programs will influence how they present information about each program on the website.

For example, interviews revealed that time off of one’s sentence, higher pay, and transferable skills are qualities of a program that users value, so programs with those qualities will be highlighted.

PROCESS

Click on the images below to enlarge them. Click on the "X” in the top right corner to close out of them.

Research

First prototype

This was my first idea for adding to Opportunites, but I decided to go in a different direction after making some Figma mockups.

Second prototype

These were some of the considerations that went into the tool I designed. I designed 6 different versions of the tool.