IE 11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

Information Links the Justice Enterprise

Squeezed by shrinking budgets and rising caseloads, individual branches of justice are beginning to cooperate on ways to develop integrated justice information systems.

In Massachusetts, drivers cannot get a license renewed if they have an outstanding parking ticket, yet defendants with outstanding warrants can routinely walk out of courthouses. That's because the police and courts must rely on an antiquated paper-based system to determine if a person has any outstanding warrants.

To change the situation, the state recently passed legislation that authorizes the spending of $2 million to build a statewide electronic warrant system. The message behind the law is that technology can improve the accuracy and speed by which different justice and law enforcement agencies share valuable information with each other.

Throughout the country, state and local justice agencies are coming to grips with the need to exchange information faster and more efficiently to improve how the justice system works. For the first time, governments are moving beyond the talk stage and are actually attempting to develop information systems for justice on an enterprise scale.

Steve Powlesland, of Price Waterhouse said that state and local justice agencies are becoming very active in integrating systems and sharing information.

"They realize that much of the information they use is the same," said Powlesland, who heads up the firm's Justice Information Systems consulting practice. "So, the agencies are trying to come up with ways to make the justice process more efficient."

Driving this desire for efficiency is the fact that most law enforcement and justice agencies are operating under shrinking budgets. With fewer dollars to spend on personnel, agencies are accelerating their efforts to squeeze more work out of fewer people. One way to do that is to reduce repetitive and redundant work. A study in Britain found that as an individual moves from arrest to trial and then incarceration, his name, date of birth and address is entered on paper and computer as many as 17 different times. A network of computers linking various justice and public safety agencies can reduce that problem by taking the information entered at the time of an arrest and passing it down the chain of justice.

Justice agencies also need enterprise-scale systems to mitigate the burden of rising civil and criminal caseloads. For example, a 1993 report by the Commission on the Future of the California Courts said that, between 1961 and 1991, filings and proceedings in the state's Court of Appeal grew by 697 percent. During the same period, municipal court judges in California saw their average annual caseload increase from 8,226 to 14,160 cases. Meanwhile, no new judgeship positions have been created in the state since 1988, according to the report.

Someone who has experienced the caseload growth firsthand is Justice George Nicholson, an associate justice on the Court of Appeal in the Third District of California. He spoke about grinding paperwork that can slow down the process of justice. "We need to bring technology into the legal system so that it reduces the paperwork drudgery and maximizes human interaction," he said.

Finally, agencies are pushing integration at the enterprise level because of a greater understanding of what computers can do. Not so long ago, any discussion about an enterprise justice system focused on building a single, monolithic computer system. But many decision-makers within the highly independent branches of justice in both state and local government have raised serious concerns about security and data ownership if such a system were to be built.

With the maturing of network technology, however, it's no longer necessary for justice agencies to settle for a single system. Instead, they can retain their own systems and, through networking, still share common information.

Technology is also better understood at the user level. Nicholson, who began his judicial career when court work was done on legal pads of paper, said technology is a tool that fits right into the judicial system because so much of what courts do is knowledge-based. He pointed out that computers aid in the cut-and-paste work that judges constantly perform to craft often complex mixes of data and law into court opinions. "More importantly," added Nicholson, "if you can do your job faster and more accurately because of computers, you will better serve the people and deliver speedier, fairer justice."

ENTERPRISE OPPORTUNITIES

Right now, it is unlikely that any state or local government has been able to deploy a true enterprise-wide justice system, where information concerning warrants, arrests, dockets and parole flows from law enforcement agencies to the prosecutors, the courts and corrections departments, as well as between the local and state branches of justice. However, a large range of solutions that integrate various components of state and local justice systems and databases are either under way or in the planning stages around the country.

Some of the solutions under way include:

+ Linking police officers in the field directly with databases of critical information. A number of law enforcement agencies are beginning to equip their police cruisers with mobile data terminals and laptop computers with modems so that officers can bypass dispatchers and link up directly with databases that contain information on driver's registrations, parking violations and even outstanding warrants. The databases contain information maintained by local, state and federal public safety agencies.

+ Linking law enforcement data with the courts. In some jurisdictions, law enforcement officials are entering traffic citations into portable computers, then transferring the information to the local courts information system, which opens a case file and checks with the Department of Motor Vehicles for previous citations. In Ventura County, Calif., a similar system also makes the citation available online to court clerks who collect the fines for uncontested citations, and to the judge who presides over contested citation hearings. Such systems could be expanded to transmit rap sheets, crime scene diagrams and even document images and photos from police departments to prosecutors.

+ Linking lawyers and courts. According to Justice Nicholson, courts need to reduce paperwork to a minimum if they expect to have any chance of streamlining the judicial process. One way to do this is to allow lawyers to file their briefs electronically via electronic mail. For legal documents that are still submitted in paper form, imaging systems can make the documents electronically accessible to anyone. In the few real instances where actual trials have been conducted using an array of technology for case management and information dissemination, judges have reported that technology reduced trial time by 50 percent.

Not a critical component of enterprise justice systems, but still important, is the use of video arraignment systems. Such systems use two-way video technology to link lawyers in one part of town with defendants in the local or county jail so that neither has to travel (sometimes long distances) to court for hearings and pre-trial proceedings. Two-way video can also work effectively in some civil trials and most appellate proceedings.

+ Linking courts and law enforcement agencies with departments of corrections. With record numbers of individuals moving in and out of prisons, it has become harder for corrections to keep tabs on such basic things as the proper release dates for inmates, and for law enforcement officials to stay informed about which inmates are out on parole and when they have been released. An enterprise-wide justice system can help corrections officials, prosecutors and sheriffs keep tabs on who is going into prison, who is coming out and when the release should occur.

+ Linking the state branches of justice with local justice agencies. High on the agenda of most states is building an infrastructure for sharing valuable criminal and judicial information on a statewide basis. Federal mandates, such as the Brady Bill and NCIC 2000, are driving most states to build new networks or upgrade existing ones. State public safety executives also recognize the expediency of giving local law enforcement agencies faster access to more accurate and up-to-date information on criminal activity. California Attorney General Dan Lungren is working multi-jurisdictionally on just such a project.

In Massachusetts, the warrant network the state is building will bolster an existing network of justice information that's already available on a statewide network serving 550 state and local public safety agencies. Administered by the Criminal History Systems Board - a state agency - the network provides local law enforcement agencies with data on motor vehicle registrations, wanted or missing persons, a driver's license suspension or stolen property. In addition, the system can give local officials information about an individual's criminal history, the status of any restraining orders and their activity as a parolee.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Talk to anyone with experience building justice information systems and they will tell you integration is no cakewalk. "In justice, there is no single person or organization that has authority over the entire enterprise," said Steve Powlesland, explaining why it's so hard to organize and implement a justice information system at the enterprise level. Some justice agencies are run by elected leaders, and their agenda might not coincide with the changes and upheavals that integration can sometimes create.

Justice involves so many different agencies and branches of government that integration becomes a series of complex issues involving technology, business and politics. "Integration is chiefly an organizational issue," said Dave Roberts, deputy director of the Search Group Inc. "Integrators must wrestle with problems concerning who owns the data, whose coding scheme is going to be used, how are privacy and confidentiality concerns going to be addressed and who authorizes changes?"

Another challenge is integrating all the information that makes up an enterprise-wide justice system. "Each individual justice system is designed to identify each case or individual in its own unique way, but trying to link information across all those different systems can be a real challenge," said Jim Zepp, director of the National Computer Center at the Justice Research and Statistics Association.

"Unfortunately, many justice agencies have developed systems for their internal purposes, independent of each other," continued Zepp. "And now we are expecting them to link together." He added that the information trail can become very complex for an integrated system to flow accurately. Criminal charges may change, large cases may be broken up into separate cases or cases may be combined. "With all the different ways information is organized and then trying to track it across different agencies, integration becomes a very complex and expensive proposition," said Zepp.

To ensure that integration succeeds at the enterprise level, Zepp and others recommend developing a sound plan that has the buy-in of all the agencies. Cooperation and coordination are the key ingredients to getting started on the right foot, according to Kenneth Bischoff, director of administrative services for the Alaska Department of Public Safety.

Bischoff, who is heading up a plan to integrate information from his department, as well as the Departments of Law and Corrections, said that the state recognized early on that the project wouldn't succeed without the buy-in from all the involved agencies. To get cooperation, Bischoff set up a multi-agency committee to oversee the development of the integration project and to make sure that everyone understood what benefits would come from cooperation. "We got them enthused about integration because they saw how it would help them to continue doing their jobs while having to cut back on staff because of budget cuts."

For large governments, integration at the enterprise level has a better chance of succeeding when it is phased in, according to Steve Powlesland. "The big bang approach, when everything is done at once, has been tried," he said, "but a lot of these efforts have run into problems." Phasing-in allows the project to be deployed in manageable chunks, and it gives the integrators time to spot and correct any problems that could worsen as the system grows.

Powlesland cautioned that planning at the enterprise level still must be carried out, even if the project is developed over phases. "The goal," he said, "is to build a system that is consistent with our legal responsibilities."



With more than 20 years of experience covering state and local government, Tod previously was the editor of Public CIO, e.Republic’s award-winning publication for information technology executives in the public sector. He is now a senior editor for Government Technology and a columnist at Governing magazine.