Two years ago, when a Miss. youth court judge contacted two professors at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) to tell them about some untapped state funds, an idea that had been on their minds began to materialize.  No efficient method for tracking juveniles through the youth court system existed at the time, so they proposed to develop a database to do just that.  SWORD, the tool that emerged from their brainstorm, has been up and running for almost a year now and a second, more advanced version of the software package is on its way.

"Let's roll these things together," Tim Rehner, a social work professor at USM, said about combining the funds that had been allocated to both Forest County and the city of Hattiesburg by the Mississippi Department of Public Safety Planning.  "Let's do a county-city-university partnership."

Based on their idea to create a real-time database to track juveniles through the youth court system, Rehner and his colleague, Mike Forster, were awarded the funding, which originated from an Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) Juvenile Accountability Incentive Block Grant.

"We should create something that fits for how people do work in the local community," Rehner said about their philosophy in developing the database.  The only problem was that they needed help to convert their vision into a technological reality.  "We know about running an agency and working with people, but we don't have a clue about how you write code and all that [computer] stuff," Rehner said. 

Putting Together the Pieces of SWORD

Rehner and Forster turned to USM's computer science departments to gather the manpower they needed to build SWORD.

"[The computer science and science of computing students] have been the backbone for actually doing the development," Rehner said. 

Most of the students who are involved with the database are doctoral candidates or graduate students and work part-time on the project as part of their graduate assistantships or during school breaks for an hourly wage.  This has its positives and negatives.

"That's one of the hardships of this program," Rehner said.  "I've got nobody that's working on it 40 hours a week."

With only a few students working on SWORD each semester and during the summer, the first version took about a year to create and only became available to the Forest County Youth Court staff in early 2003.

SWORD was developed with youth court judges and counselors in mind as well as detention center staff, but molding the database to fit their daily routines was not as easy as Rehner and the students had anticipated.

"The youth court system was pretty informal and [the staff] all had their own ways of doing things," Rehner said.  "Our discovery process was pretty long," he added.  "We really kind of did it from the back."

Once it was finished, SWORD, Version 1.0, was designed to store various types of information about juveniles including demographics, contacts, data about their parents and relatives, charges they have faced, their dispositions to charges and court actions that have taken place involving them.

"[The different categories of information] are all on separate pages and they're all really intuitive," Rehner said.  "[It] simplifies reporting requirements."

Prior to SWORD, youth court counselors had to send paperwork for each juvenile to the Mississippi Administrative Office of the Courts and the Department of Human Services.  This required staff to manually fill out two separate forms with virtually the same information.  With SWORD, the data is already in the system, which now generates both forms for the counselors, who need only send the forms to the appropriate destination.

"Our hope is that we're going to move soon to sending them electronically," said Rehner. 

Expanding SWORD's Capabilities

Rehner also has other future plans for SWORD and he hopes the next, more advanced version of the software will be completed by next summer.

 "We've conceptually modified SWORD so that's it's going to be easy to add other counties and detention centers," said Rehner.

While adding other counties and juvenile facilities statewide is his goal, Rehner admits that it is ambitious.  So, for the immediate future, his focus is more local. 

"At this point, I'd probably be happy saying we'd want to bring on the [nearby] counties that send juveniles to our detention center," said Rehner.

In addition to expanding the database to include juveniles in other geographical areas, it will also be enhanced to store more information than it does currently.

"[We wanted] to be able to provide more case management space in the software package," Rehner said.  To achieve this, the next version of SWORD will include areas for information about juveniles such as psycho-social histories and treatment plans, Rehner said.  "There's a lot that we want to do."

Pooling Data from Different Agencies

To accomplish its goals, SWORD will help juvenile justice staff to access records from other community agencies.

"We've gotten verbal support for sharing information," Rehner said.  The Hattiesburg police department as well as the school system have agreed to allow their records that correspond to juveniles who are part of SWORD to become part of the database.

"We've gotten lots of support from other community agencies," Rehner said.  "That's a big deal," he said noting that OJJDP has been advocating for initiatives to increase information sharing among different agencies.

Although there are confidentiality and privacy issues, Rehner hopes that those can be worked out so that everyone who deals with the juvenile can access his or her pertinent information.  

"I think if technology is going to help us in providing good services, then we have to become able to make this data available to the people who interface with the kid," Rehner said.  "Then you have something powerful."

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To learn more about SWORD, email Tim Rehner at tim.rehner@usm.edu