First Step Act Impact
- an infographic presenting findings from a comprehensive research report
Background
The First Step Act of 2018 (signed into law on December 21, 2018) contains provisions relating to sentencing, prison programming, recidivism reduction efforts, and reentry procedures. It focuses principally on creating a framework for recidivism reduction programming and incentives to be implemented by the Attorney General, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and other criminal justice agencies.
One year after implementation, the U.S. Sentencing Commission studied the impact of the five provisions of the Act related to sentencing reform and released a comprehensive report, The First Step Act of 2018: One Year of Implementation.
Challenges
The First Step Act received a great deal of attention in the mainstream media; however, much of the discussion was surface-level. The Commission's lengthier research report covered important but challenging topics to convey in a brief fashion.
Our challenge was to describe in plain language the five very distinct key sentencing components of the First Step Act and the Commission’s new research so that the information is properly considered and widely shared by federal judges and lawmakers as well as incarcerated individuals and their loved ones.
Approach
Our team has observed through website metrics that infographics offer an approachable introduction to some of the multi-layered, complex research projects previously undertaken by the Commission. These “Reports-At-A-Glance” entice readers to dig deeper into a topic by visiting the full report
Once the Commission's First Step Act research report was published, the team created visuals of the findings and repackaged them into one "small-but-mighty" infographic (below).
Illustration
The top of the infographic briefly describes what the tool is meant to achieve.
Each of the sections of the infographic tie back to one of the five sentencing reform provisions of the First Step Act along with a specific chapter of the full report. The sections of the final PDF are hyperlinked to the beginning of the section of the full report so that viewers who seek more information can readily access it.
The callout boxes on the left briefly describe each provision’s intention.
Our team selected some of the most impactful findings from each section of the report to visualize under each section.
We directed focus of the reader to specific data using one bold color (purple to denote the bipartisan efforts of the bill) accompanied by a gray for the comparison data.
We then repackaged each section of the infographic into bite-sized pieces for social media posting (see below).
