ZYPHER CONSULTING
Criminal Justice
Strategy & Systems
Zypher is an independent strategic advisory firm. We bring together research, firsthand experience, and an understanding of how institutions work to help people make better decisions about criminal justice policy and put those decisions into practice.
How Zypher works
We start by learning how a system works day to day: who makes decisions, what shapes those decisions, and how they affect the people who live with them. We bring research and firsthand experience together to shape a strategy, help carry it out, and adjust it based on what happens.Take a reentry proposal. We’d look at what it asks of agencies, what community organizations can realistically deliver, and what people coming home are likely to encounter.What we learn can shape the proposal and help us explain it in terms that matter to a legislator, a corrections official, or a service provider. Once the policy is in place, we look at whether it’s doing what it was meant to do and use what we learn to refine it.
When to call Zypher
Call Zypher when a criminal justice question cuts across roles or institutions and you need to decide what to do next. You might be working out how to put a reform into practice, why an initiative is falling short, how to share a complex argument in a short format, or how to help someone navigate reentry.For the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU School of Law, we turned moments from longer talks into short social media clips. The Center wanted engaging clips that spoke to the issues it works on while preserving the rigor of the original discussion. We selected passages that carried a speaker’s central point and edited them so each clip could stand on its own.
About Zypher
Zach Ragone founded Zypher Consulting after seeing how differently the same criminal justice system can look depending on where you stand. His perspective comes from firsthand experience with the system and years of working with people across federal law enforcement agencies, legislative offices, nonprofits, research institutions, and advocacy groups.Those experiences raised a question that became the starting point for Zypher: what could people see more clearly, and do differently, if they understood how the system looked from where others stood?
Get in touch
Have a criminal justice policy question, a project in development, or an idea you’d like to talk through? Tell us a little about what you’re working on and where you could use another perspective.
