Digital Justice: How Modernization Makes for Fair Outcomes

The justice system is a network of agencies and organizations that rely on well-defined processes to achieve fair and ethical outcomes. Information sharing is the fuel that powers the system. When information isn’t flowing freely, participants — investigators, judges, attorneys, probation officers and administrative support — can’t perform their jobs effectively to make key decisions about charging, adjudications and correctional programs.

When information is not shared quickly and accurately, the criminal justice system slows down, becomes costly and fails to achieve its intended outcomes. For example, a four-day delay in transferring arrest paperwork from the jail to the court arraignment increases jail costs. A career criminal who avoids being charged for a higher offense due to missing prior convictions impacts community safety. Incomplete data during the presentence investigation can lead to incorrect sentencing recommendations. Additionally, lost digital evidence that could have exonerated a defendant can result in unfair outcomes.

CHALLENGES IN JUSTICE INFORMATION SHARING

Independent justice organizations, like police, prosecutors, courts, public defenders and corrections, have always struggled to make information sharing work, but have been hampered by numerous challenges:

• The varying methods and interpretations of data storage and terminology that are in separate computer silos.
• Matching identities to merge records and aggregate data across systems.
• Maintaining up-to-date information and correcting errors or gaps
• Limiting information distribution due to privacy and security laws and regulations.

Modern technology and standards are helping agencies and organizations to address these challenges to improve the quality and effectiveness of justice information systems.

To build the bridge across the diverse siloed systems, justice information systems aim to provide an integrated view of the enterprise, enabling well-informed decision-making at every step. This requires clarity and consistency in the meaning of the data element terms and a consensus about how data elements are named across the participating systems to ensure interoperability.

The diverse data sources in a justice information system can share data meanings by using the framework provided by NIEMOpen, the national data standard that defines a common vocabulary of over 20,000 terms for a variety of disciplines, including justice. NIEMOpen can be used to define a particular justice system data model by taking advantage of its application programming interface.

To accurately portray a person's total involvement across multiple data sources, these systems must correctly match the identities of the individual named in each record. Modern entity resolution software products support matching names to merge records across multiple systems, using artificial intelligence or machine learning.

Presenting the most current data about a person accurately and reliably has led to new ways to collect and store data from multiple sources. Instead of basing the data storage on classical relational databases, knowledge graph technology stores data in a way that describes the relationships between data points in accordance with the standard justice data definitions. Databases built following knowledge graph standards can ingest both structured data from classical databases or unstructured data such as documents or images, and can be used in distributed systems where there is always real-time access to all data sources. When the entity resolution software is combined with knowledge graph technology, the connection between all records across systems is assured.

The required privacy and security provisions in modern justice systems are provided through a common role-based authorization and access component that lets data owners declare who can have access down to the data element level. In this way, access to juvenile data or sexual attack victim information can be limited to those who have a need to know the information.

IMPACTS OF MODERNIZATION

With these tools and technologies, a modern justice information system can provide real-time access to information, enabling more informed decisions. Participating entities can draw on perfectly linked data sources to present consistent, repeatable and reliable data. A portal can serve the information needs of every agency or organization without requiring major software development.

The knowledge graph technology offers new ways to ask questions of enterprise data. Users can ask questions using natural language processing to discover previously unknown relationships. For example, a graph in a specific system can answer questions about the influence of prosecutor diversion programs on recidivism.

With a reimagined system architecture employing these technologies, an enterprise justice information system can show a return on investment in these results:

• Automation of interagency processes across multiple case management systems ensures reliable, accurate, real-time data matching by names from contributing systems.
• A portal provides access to all relevant data for people and cases from a single point of entry. It uncovers new insights into relationships between people, events and justice processes. It identifies gaps in evidence or logic supporting charges and decision-making.
• A common, understandable vocabulary of terms across agencies improves collaboration.
• Consistent and extensive security and privacy protections are implemented.
• Eliminating redundant data entry and update habits reduces costs and staffing requirements
• Data-informed decision-making and shorter timelines streamline justice administration.

State and local agencies face challenges in staffing and funding justice operations, leading them to search for greater efficiency and effectiveness in how the system works. State and local jurisdictions are finding older concepts and architectures too costly or rigid. Jurisdictions from coast to coast are adopting new modern architectures to radically improve information-sharing platforms and are finding a measurable return on investment. From Sonoma County, Calif., to the Council on Criminal Justice in Washington, D.C., projects are underway to take the bold step of reimagining the way justice information is shared across the component agencies involved in the justice enterprise.

Paul Wormeli, an independent consultant and former deputy administrator of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration at the U.S. Department of Justice, was named one of Government Technology's Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers in 2011.