What happens when someone is arrested in West Virginia and booked into one of the state's 10 regional jails?  That information becomes available to the public immediately on the West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority's (WRJA) website, thanks to an offender monitor system that links jails throughout the state and keeps track of offender data in real time.

The WRJA uses Syscon's TAG offender management system to collect and store information about inmates from the time they are booked into jail through to their release back into the community.

According to Duane Neely, Information Services Manager for the WRJA, the need for an integrated, computerized offender management system cropped up when West Virginia decided to regionalize its jails, going from 55 county jails to just 10 statewide.

"Once we did that, we needed some kind of a unified database to track the movement of inmates between facilities," said Neely.

The agency opted to use Syscon's TAG system, which provides the agency with a web-based, Oracle-driven offender management system that collects and stores data about offenders throughout their incarceration.

While the TAG system has been in use in a variety of individual jurisdictions in the United States and Canada for about 25 years, it is currently being installed overseas in England and Wales as part of an initiative there to develop a National Offender Management Service (NOMS).  NOMS was created in 2004 to unify correctional services in the U.K. so that the prison system and probation work more effectively with one another.

According to Floyd Sully, Syscon's Chief Executive Officer, the concept of a nationwide offender management system is viable in England and Wales because they are a unified entity and there are no states or provinces, where correctional services vary, to contend with like in North America. 

In the U.S. and Canada, bringing every jurisdiction onto the same system is a far greater undertaking, he said.

"To try and [build] a national offender management system requires significant data exchange and data integration," Sully said.  "The real challenge always has been, how do you share data, how do you create a national offender management system with disparate systems?" he added.  "The TAG system probably has the largest footprint in America in terms of the number of offenders that are managed with our software, [but] it still doesn't begin to approach capturing all the data in the U.S. market."

Sully noted that the U.S. Department of Justice's XML Standards for data exchange are a step in the right direction towards electronically linking state and local law enforcement agencies, paving the way for them to share data nationally.  But, while progress towards that goal is being made, he said Syscon's TAG system is being used in a variety of jurisdictions to manage data and connect correctional facilities on a smaller scale, like in West Virginia.

According to Neely, the TAG system that is in place at all of West Virginia's regionalized jails provides staff with everything they need to know about inmates, including historical data about previous periods of incarceration, like whether or not the inmate was flagged for being part of a gang or being a disciplinary problem.

The system also tracks an inmate from facility to facility, he said, and helps the agency track inmates who are shifted around when overcrowding becomes an issue.

"We have the ability to say if we have overcrowding in one of our facilities, we can transfer the inmate to another facility," said Neely.  "All the records transfer automatically.  There is no paper."

Another benefit of the TAG system is that it can produce automated reports about the inmate population for the Executive Director of the WRJA, Neely said.  It also can produce similar reports for the public, he added.

"Essentially, [we] can go into a database, retrieve all of this information [and] put it in a readable view [for the public]," Neely said. 

Neely explained that the system enables the WRJA to better serve the general public by allowing the agency to determine, in real time, exactly who it has behind bars in its jails.  He said that, previously, WRJA staff would have to call around from facility to facility to find out if a particular person was incarcerated at one of the jails.  Now, staff need only input a name into a computer to find out if they are in WRJA custody.

Likewise, the public can access information about current inmates through the agency's website.

"It's actually a public service, being able to manage the database from a statewide perspective," Neely said.

While the 10 regional jails share information through the TAG system, the W.V. Division of Juvenile Services also uses a separate version of Syscon's system.  Although the juvenile system is not connected to the jails for legal reasons, Neely said, the plan calls for the state Division of Corrections to jump on board with the jails, as well.

"The vision is to expand it to other incarcerating agencies within the state," Neely said, adding that, eventually, the judges may be linked through this offender management system, too.

While the TAG system is an effective way for agencies to monitor their inmate populations, Sully said that it often takes years to install these systems.  In England, he said, the project has been underway for a year and should take a few more to complete.

"It's not a small undertaking to put these systems in," Sully said.  "These systems are often a work in progress for a number of years."

According to Neely, it has taken West Virginia over three years to get to this point.  While the plan is for the system to be expanded to the DOC and the courts in the future, he said the agency is pleased with the progress it has made thus far.

"We look at it as a great public service," Neely said. 

Resources:

Syscon  www.syscon.net

WRJA www.wrja.com

XML Standards http://it.ojp.gov/topic.jsp?topic_id=43