Wade Gibbs, a Kentucky parole officer, found one of his parolees in another Kentucky jail. The parolee had been charged with a serious offense involving a weapon and had failed to notify Gibbs of his new arrest as directed by the conditions of his release.
"This is much easier than calling all of the jails and going through the channels to look for a particular person," said Gibbs. "I've been very impressed with how simple the system is to use."
JusticeXchange provides criminal justice professionals with secure access to booking records, incident reports, and other data from thousands of agencies across the country and is accessible by Web Portal or a Global Justice XML compliant interface. It also allows users to set up a watch list of individuals they want to keep track of such as probationers and parolees. Whenever one is booked into a participating jail across the country, an -mail is sent to notify the user of the arrest.
Another Kentucky parole officer, Paul Newman, uses the watch feature to track his absconders. One individual on his list was wanted for murder, escape II, and DUI. Newman was e-mailed when the offender was arrested and booked into another county jail.
"That offender was immediately sent back to prison to begin serving time on his life sentence," said Newman. "I have placed all of our high-risk offenders and absconders on the watch list."
The Florida Department of Corrections ran 39,000 absconders against the JusticeXchange database recently and more than 1,300 matches were returned based on offenders currently sitting in jail.
"There were 370 successful matches received on absconders currently in a local Florida jail," said Vernon Barber, correctional program administrator for the Florida DOC. "We have been able to reduce our absconder population by 10 to 12 percent annually."
In recent weeks, JusticeXchange Web Portal underwent several enhancements. Texas users can sign up to be notified on incident reports and traffic citations under a specific person's name. Arkansas users can now create wanted posters from drivers' license photos and pull signature images from the license to help with investigations such as fraud.
