In a world of high caseloads with offenders who are on the brink of recidivism, along come improvements in community corrections technologies that can makes officers' jobs easier and the outcomes for their clientele even better.

"We are chipping away at the future of probation and parole," said Martin Horn, Commissioner of the New York City Corrections and Probation Departments. Horn was the keynote speaker at the recent 5th Annual Innovative Technologies in Community Corrections Conference in Boston.

Horn told participants at the conference that 75 percent of the city's probation caseload is using kiosks for reporting in to their probation officers. And, crime has continued to go down, he said.

This is good news for the future of technology use in probation and parole settings. Many other advances are also being made, ranging from the types of management systems that agencies use to track offenders to the ways that they monitor for substance abuse.

Below is a sampling of technologies that different agencies across the country have had some success with.

Transdermal Alcohol Testing in Michigan

Since 2000, Michigan parolees and probationers have been under corrections supervision using remote alcohol testing by radio frequency. The product, known as SCRAM for Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor by AMS (Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc.), is being testing in three sites nationwide to detect alcohol consumption by measuring ethanol as it migrates through the skin.

According to Steven Bock, Electronic Monitoring Coordinator for the Michigan Department of Corrections, the technology requires no officer participation and works much like electronic monitoring where an offender has to "check in" at an assigned time to a modem that reads the blood alcohol concentration from the device.

"What it does is it collects a sample of the gases [from] the perspiration of an offender and uses free cell technology to determine the blood alcohol level," he said.

Bock, whose agency tested and just purchased the device, presented this information at the Innovative Technologies in Community Corrections Conference.

As with an electronic monitoring bracelet, an offender with SCRAM wears a cuff-like device on his ankle 24 hours a day, seven days a week that has a sensor to measure the ethanol levels given off by perspiration from his skin. The measurements can be dictated by the monitoring agency on a predetermined schedule.

"At any given time during the day the offender has to be near th[e] modem [to provide the data]," said Bock.

The SCRAM bracelet also has a component that can detect any tampering with the device. This component acts as an electronic link between the two parts and secures the bracelet to the offender's ankle. The back strap has temperature and infrared sensors that detect tampering while the other side of the device communicates with the modem. Therefore, if an offender tries to slide a credit card between the sensor and the skin, the bracelet would know.

In addition, the device produces alcohol content graphs once an alcohol event is recorded that can be interpreted to determine when there is a normal alcohol consumption event verses an accidental or intentional spill of alcohol on the leg.

"There's a lot of interpretation that goes on," Bock said.

To provide those graphs, the SCRAM Modem has to retrieve the data from the bracelet and, in the event of a positive alcohol reading or tamper alarm, the data is transmitted to SCRAMnet - the web-based application that is managed by AMS.

SCRAMnet is accessible via the Internet using a standard web browser so that personnel from the monitoring agency can control monitoring schedules, testing and can respond to any problems.

Bock said that the alerts show up under an offender's listing in the notification and include alcohol and potential alcohol events, tampers or potential tamper events and communications or equipment errors. SCRAMnet notifies the monitoring agency either from its call center or by direct contact with the agency.

In Michigan, the data downloads occur once a day for the agency staff to monitor, according to Bock.

Staff receiving the notification will see information presented in a graph format with information about temperature readings, distance or duration of the readings and the alcohol consumption readings.

Temperature and distance indicate contact with the skin and duration of contact, while the alcohol graph indicates an alcohol usage or potential alcohol events.

"The nice thing about this as opposed to the other devices is that you're going to get a complete picture if the drinking event," said Bock.

Staff that analyze the graph notifications from SCRAMnet need to be trained in the types of readings to look for.

"It takes quite a bit of analysis, which is one of the hard things about this product at this time," said Bock.

According to Bock, how fast alcohol burns off is also reflected in the graphs. A fast burn off could mean an interferrent such as hairspray, while a true consumption would take longer to burn off and would be indicated that way in the graph.

A nice feature provided by AMS is that a staff person currently reviews each drinking event and tamper event to certify the agency's interpretation is proper.

While Michigan has been pleased with the product overall, there are some limitations with it that need to be recognized.

According to Bock, agencies need to understand that the device itself requires an offender to be at his home to complete the test. It is also important to note that the battery has a 90-day life and needs to be replaced often, that the bracelets need to be recalibrated every six months, which means they are sent back to the manufacturer and, while the device is water resistant - and can be used in a shower - it cannot be submerged.

Other concerns include limitations for use by individuals with small ankles as the device can be slipped off.

But the underlying message that Michigan officials conveyed about SCRAM was that it provided much more testing of offenders at a cost that was reasonable for their budget.

Building an Information Sharing System in Iowa

When probation caseloads were growing and resources were shrinking in Iowa, the Department of Corrections knew that it had to figure out a way for corrections personnel to share information so they could make better decisions about offenders in a more cost and time effective way.  The agency's solution to this communication and information management problem was to create the Iowa Corrections Offender Network (ICON), which now links the DOC's prisons, residential facilities and field offices so they can trade data back and forth.

"We had identified our need," Jerry Bartruff, Treatment Director for the Iowa DOC, said at the Innovative Technologies for Community Corrections Conference in Boston.  "We'd established that we wanted to make technology work for our line staff."

With this goal in mind, the DOC contracted with the West Des Moines-based Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to build ICON.

"We wanted a powerful platform that was expandable, easy to program and end users could understand," said Bartruff.

After deciding to use Microsoft Windows 2000 servers, with one active directory for centralized security, and Windows SQL Server 2000 databases, the DOC worked with the ATG to determine what information needed to be included in ICON and how that information should flow through the system.  Together, their mission was to build an "integrated corrections management system that saves criminal justice staff time and state resources," according to Bartruff.

ICON's development was overseen by three groups of employees: a core group, a data warehouse group and a medical group.

"The core group is essentially a group of professionals in the Iowa DOC who are considered to be masters of what they do," Bartruff said. 

According to Bartruff, the data warehouse group was comprised of high-level analysis staff, while the medical group consisted of people who worked with the users.  The employees who were part of these groups were expected to oversee the development of ICON in addition to their regular jobs, he added.

"We were asking people to do a heck of a lot for a long period of time," Bartruff said.

Their collective efforts, however, manifested in an offender management system that links various corrections entities in the state, eliminates repeated research and data entry and allows staff to process reports and record information more efficiently.

"We can generate a report that grabs the existing data [about an offender] that is still pertinent and build [on it]," Bartruff said. 

End users can also get up-to-date caseload information from the system, customized reports and statistics and program outcome statistics.  Also, through ICON, they have access to personal information about offenders, like health issues, family members, body markings, and employment history; they can view offenders' criminal histories, detailing, arrest incidents, charges and sentences; and they can determine what different treatment programs or educational classes offenders are involved in.

"We wanted to give [staff] all the information they need to do their jobs at their desktop," Bartruff said. 

In addition to helping the DOC staff who work directly with offenders, the system offers higher level administrative staff the opportunity to do research, find data to justify budgetary decisions and quantify program costs.

While ICON has the ability to keep track of offender information, like demographics and past criminal activity, it can manage other data about offenders, too.

"Part of the ICON [system] is not only the offender management system, but other things are connected, [too]," said Bartruff.

Information about offenders' bank accounts, medical histories, pharmacy needs and commissary transactions is all available through ICON, he said.

Despite all of its current capabilities, the DOC hopes to further enhance ICON by expanding its data mining capabilities and enabling charge and sentence information to stream directly from the courts into the system.  Also, the agency hopes to improve staff access to ICON by supplying all employees with palm pilots and incorporating system data into every police squad car in Iowa within the next five years.

"Along the process [of creating ICON], it's been difficult," Bartruff said.  "We had to be stubborn to get what we wanted from our developer."

But, ultimately, the DOC ended up with a tool that will save the agency time and money and enable employees to share information back and forth to better monitor offenders and make decisions about their custody and supervision, according to Bartruff.  And corrections employees were excited to make the switch over to ICON, he said.

"I think people were so used to working in [an] environment [where] one hand didn't know what the other was doing that they were excited [about shifting to ICON]," he said.

The idea of simplifying the jobs of community corrections staff is cropping up in other jurisdictions as well. Court Services and Offender Supervision staff in Washington DC  accomplished this by building their own automated case management system.

Modernizing Case Management

For the Washington DC Court Services and Offender Services Agency, consolidation was a good thing and a bad thing.

On the negative side, by merging two separate agencies into the CSOSA office, it caused the existing computer system and network to go on overload. The limitations of the computer system became apparent after the merger as computers crashed on a daily basis. But on the other hand, it caused agency officials to take a long, hard look at how the newly formed agency was functioning.

The result in the end was a positive one as, after six months of planning, testing and developing, the agency unveiled a new record tracking system for offenders on pretrial, parole, probation and supervised release in DC. The system, called SMART for Supervision and Management Automated Record Tracking, has been in operation since January 2002.

"This was a very high priority and there was a lot of involvement," said Katherine Maxey, Senior Consultant for SRA International, which was hired to help develop the system.

In the beginning of the process, CSOSA officials reviewed 19 commercial off-the-shelf products and evaluated their capabilities against the requirements that were determined by eight different subcommittees within CSOSA.  From that review, there were three alternatives for the agency to choose from: to custom build a system, to modify another internal CSOSA system or to configure one of the off-the-shelf products.

According to Maxey, the agency chose to build its own because of the tight development deadline of January 2002, that elements could be added on gradually to a custom system and because none of the requirements determined as important for the project would have to be sacrificed.

Some of those requirements include that the system:
*be offender-centric
*track historical data electronically
*provide automatic notification of events in support of CSOSA policies
*seamlessly integrate with other agencies where appropriate
*be secure for sensitive data
*provides secure access from inside and outside the agency
*have a usable and easily navigable interface
*include a fully searchable journal function
*provide access via the Internet access, among others.

The SMART project was fast-tracked and ultimately was delivered with 322 tables and 6,452 ASP or active server pages.

What the SMART system provided the CSOSA staff was a new way of tracking offenders and communicating with each other.

Here's how it functions: each user of the system has a home page of their own that provides them with the most frequently used case view, a caseload list, team assignments, branch assignments and a search function. 

For intake, the system provides automatic assignment of offenders to teams within the agency based on offender demographics, case type and round robin cycles. If, for example, the offender is Spanish-speaking, then the system would choose a supervision team, based on that characteristic.

In addition, the system provides detailed offender/diagnostic information online including a physical description, birth date, marriage status, intentifiers, aliases, housing and employment history, dockets and charges, supervision sentences, drug test results, victim data, pre-sentence investigation reports, and history of assignments to CSOs and teams.

Other modules of the system would allow treatment, community services, vocational and technical education and employment referral and tracking that will balance against allocated funding resources, provide vendor invoice data and capture offenders' signatures electronically at vendor sites to confirm attendance at programs.

Beyond this, the system integrates supervisors' signatures images for delivery of documents to the DC Superior Court, tracks the approval process, automatically generates a number of reports such as pre-sentence investigation reports, drug reports and others and interfaces with external agencies such as the police department, superior court and other agencies.

In addition, the system is capable of being downloaded onto a portable laptop to provide access to the system in the field.

Because of the tight deadline, CSOSA staff learned much about how they would have approached the system's development differently and the components of the plan that worked well.

According to Ginger Lynch, Project Manager for CSOSA, the only change the project developers would make in the process is to have more time to convert the data into the system parameters.

"We crammed it into two weeks and it wasn't enough," she said.

But on the positive side, the planning and involvement of agency staff and supervisors on the front end paid off with a system that functions well for everyone.

"That was key to successful deployment," she added.

And in the end, it is the involvement of staff in determining the needs technology can fulfill that matters most.

"Technology is not a silver bullet," said James Keller, Director of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center - Rocky Mountain to conferees at the technology conference. "It can cause problems if it's not used in the right way."

Resources:

For information about SCRAM, go to www.alcoholmonitoring.com

For more information about ICON, contact Bartruff at jerry.bartruff@doc.state.ia.us

For information about the CSOSA project, contact Ginger Lynch at 202-442-1967 or ginger.lynch@csosa.gov