Dionne Hutton

Dionne Hutton leads the Foundation's technology and data infrastructure and owns the methodology behind its Economic Impact Study — the discipline that determines whether the Foundation's numbers survive scrutiny.

Her career began in national security. After serving as a U.S. Army Signal Officer, she spent more than two decades in intelligence contracting, designing and integrating distributed front-end and back-end systems with particular depth in the data and service layers. She has worked across Java, the Spring framework, Python, and Angular alongside big-data tooling including Hadoop, Spark, Airflow, and ElasticSearch, and more recently served as a senior software engineer at the commerce-technology company SpotOn. Since 2013 she has also owned Take One Promos, an independent software-engineering and project-management practice.

She holds four degrees: a Master of Science in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Science in Information and Telecommunications Systems Management from Capitol College, a Bachelor of Science in Computer and Information Science from the University of Maryland University College, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Journalism from Shippensburg University. She has continued formal coursework throughout her career in modern application and data frameworks.

As Director of Technology and Data, Hutton owns the Economic Impact Study's data architecture, intake pipeline, modeling, and classification taxonomy — the rules that determine what counts as an acquittal, a dismissal, a reversal, or a plea, and therefore what any published figure actually means. Her aim for the study is a national evidence base that quantifies the human and financial costs of federal prosecution and can stand up to the scrutiny of the policymakers it is meant to inform. She also serves as product owner for the Foundation's website rebuild and its constituent-data systems. Because the person who designed the classification standard also runs the systems that collect the data, the Foundation's research is built to be checked rather than simply believed.