There is certainly no shortage of numbers tallied in corrections: the number of escapes, the number of assaults and even the number of suicide attempts. Yearly, corrections departments track these statistics and provide them to the public and other states for comparison.

The Association of State Correctional Administrators  sees a problem with the digits, however. Since every state tallies its statistics differently, corrections departments are comparing apples to oranges, it says, which provides a blurry picture of what actually happens in the field.

“This is an across the board problem,” says PADOC Secretary Jeffrey Beard, an ASCA executive member. “Some states consider it an escape when an offender tries to climb over a fence. Other states only consider it an escape if the inmate actually makes it over the fence. Meanwhile, another state might tally it as an escape if the inmate makes it over property lines.”

These differences create a number of problems for corrections. Looking at national data, there is a large discrepancy in state to state assaults and escapes because of the way each state measures these incidents, making current data unclear and unreliable.

“Legislators would call commissioners to task them because they weren't measuring up to another jurisdiction with regard to assault rate or mortality rate,” explains ASCA Executive Director Camille Camp. “But those numbers weren't valid anyway because there was no standard when it came to reporting them. ASCA decided to do something about it, so we all came together to create standards and measurements.”

ASCA developed the Performance Measures Committee in 2004. The committee is made up of directors, commissioners and corrections experts, all of whom helped to develop the 123-page report Defining and Measuring Corrections Performance, which was updated to include new key indicators this year. The publication offers comprehensive guidelines and protocol for reporting everything from assaults to escapes to suicide attempts.

“If we can get everyone in corrections on the same page, we can certainly combat some of the anecdotal evidence that plagues this field,” says Beard. “We can provide some hard numbers that show what actually happens in corrections because corrections doesn't have anything to hide.”

The committee also found that although many prisons were collecting information about their systems, more than half the departments didn't provide data about prisoner-on-prisoner assault or prisoner-on-staff assaults.

The report was developed around eight central categories: security, safety, order, health and mental health, programming, justice, population management and human resource management. After a year of research and discussion, the subcommittee released its report, and started a data-collection pilot program in six states. Each state reported its data daily, and every month entered the numbers into an ASCA server.

According to Beard, the pilot program was successful. ASCA was able to obtain real-time data about corrections, and state officials used a web-based application to keep track of incidents with their facilities.

“For an administrator, this is a very important report and pilot program,” Beard says. “If you're in Ohio and you have a three percent positive rate for drug tests, and you notice that Pennsylvania has only a two-tenths percent positive rate, you're going to get on the phone to Pennsylvania and find out what they are doing. In other words, this is a great way to get best practices. If someone is doing better in an area than you are, you can learn from them.”

Now, ASCA is gearing up to expand the program to more states, with the aim of eventually taking the standards nationwide. Currently, 24 states are signed on to try the measurements and guidelines and ASCA is hopeful that more will take an interest.

“This will help with uniformity in data,” adds Camp. “Now we will be able to compare and contrast jurisdictions. And when the federal government is making choices about performance issues that they want to fund and help out with, they can look over the field of corrections and see where the needs are. But the whole success of this project will depend on getting all of the states involved. Once that happens, we will really be able to accomplish a lot with these standards.”

Currently, ASCA is exploring funding options to further the project. Beard says the association hopes to eventually run a server with all the collected national data so administrators and legislators nationwide can access the statistics.

“This will help corrections open up and become transparent to the public,” says Beard. “To a large degree, people do want us to be out of sight and out of mind, but I think we need systems in place such as this one so that we can prove that we do our jobs and we do them well; and when we do struggle, we can fix those areas much more easily.”

As more states implement ASCA's standards of measurements, corrections has the chance to stop comparing apples to oranges and begin to better and more consistently show what's really going on behind bars.

Bottom Line: ASCA's measurement standards can change the face of corrections if every DOC gets on board.