Wayne County Maintains FOCUS Changed the Face of Criminal Justice

Snapshot

Organization Wayne County Department of Community Justice.

The Challenge Lack of data to facilitate decision-making led to an inefficient use of resources.

The Strategy Create a system to automate Wayne County's operations and handle complex data and research requests.

The Results Automation of a central operational system enhanced decision-making and improved resource efficiency.

Information Builders Solution FOCUS, FOCUS Six.

"It's been proven that if we can keep people out of jail and get them into a well-structured community corrections program, they're less likely to be repeat offenders," says Jeriel Heard, director of the Department of Community Justice. "Our Community Corrections Information System (CCIS) not only helps us administrate and track these probationary programs, it's helped us win the grant money to create additional programs to prevent crime, and it's based on FOCUS from Information Builders."

With a total population of over 2 million, Wayne County, Michigan, is one of the ten largest counties in the United States. The Department of Community Justice, located in Detroit, is the centralized planning, monitoring, and evaluation agency for the entire Wayne County criminal justice system.

"We oversee the administration of all of our state community corrections grant funds," says Heard. "This includes contracts for halfway houses, day treatment programs, and our alternative workforce program, which is one of the largest community service work crew programs in the country."

Automating for Quicker, Better Information

"Many of the problems in the criminal justice system are directly related to a lack of data that could facilitate decisionmaking," says Heard. A former police officer, Heard was brought on board by Wayne County to try to correct some of these problems. Given Wayne County's large population base and metropolitan center, the problems endemic to the criminal justice system across the U.S. were magnified here.

According to Joe Clark, director of End-User Services for Wayne County Department of Community Justice, Heard's very first request was for comprehensive information. "He wanted to get a handle on what was going on," relates Clark. But this was not an easy request to fill. Much of the county's data was paper-based, while some groups had attempted to create their own systems to track information. These systems were very narrow in terms of the information kept, and because they were on a variety of platforms that didn't talk to each other, groups couldn't share information. "A lot of stuff fell through the cracks," says Clark.

Heard added, "We never had the comprehensive data to view, for example, how all the district courts – we have more than 20 in Wayne County – were using the jail system and the community corrections system. Resources were not being used as effectively as possible."

Thanks to Heard's request, it became imperative that Wayne County automate, and in the fall of 1995, Information Builders' Professional Services Division was called in to do the original specification gathering and design of the mainframe FOCUS database that would become the Community Corrections Information System (CCIS).

"The system is successful because it's so comprehensive," says Clark. In fact, it is part of a vast turnaround in automating Wayne County's operations.

The Criminal Justice Data Warehouse

CCIS was designed to serve two purposes. First, it keeps track of all the offenders in community corrections programs in Wayne County and is used for billing. Community corrections program providers include halfway houses, substance abuse treatment programs, and educational facilities, and the charges associated with these are paid by Wayne County and are tracked by the system.

Secondly, CCIS is an integrated criminal justice data warehouse designed to handle complex data and research requests. It is used to do criminal justice studies and to look for patterns: crimes committed, how often, repeat offenses. Other demographic offender data such as location of residence, education, and employment status is also tracked. "Not only do we manually enter data," says Clark, "we extract it from other systems around the state and the country – including court, jail, and prosecutors – and pull it into CCIS. FOCUS is great for this because it can read a lot of different file structures."

The resulting reports are used to apply for grant money to create additional programs to prevent crime, reduce the number of people going to jail, and reduce the repeat offender rate. "We've had a lot of success with this," says Clark. "We've received national recognition for some of our studies. Other counties around the country are starting to do similar things."

CCIS is used by a variety of groups. The primary user is Robert Mazur, MIS coordinator for Criminal Justice, who helped Clark develop the system and is responsible for generating statistical reports. Mazur uses FOCUS Six for Windows, Information Builders' desktop reporting and decision support tool, to create these reports, which go to police chiefs, prosecuting attorneys, the Warrant Enforcement Bureau, and to management within the county.

Other users include 15 community correction service providers, who connect to the system remotely via modem. They use CCIS to enter community corrections information about individuals in their care. This information is used to generate and verify billing and to track the success of the programs.

The system is also used by the Warrant Enforcement Bureau. "If someone skips out of their community corrections clinic, or they fail to meet with their probation officer, or if an electronic tether is damaged or compromised," says Clark, "then the Warrant Enforcement Bureau gets involved. They use the system to record and track progress on finding and apprehending these people."

And how do users feel about the system? "They love it," says Clark. "Thanks to Maintain and the GUI interface it provides, users find it very easy to use. They were excited when they first saw the multiple cascading windows, the pop-up help and value lists. You can't get much closer to the look and feel of a PC-based application on the mainframe."

Professional Services Contributes Expertise

The original CCIS system was created by Information Builders' Professional Services Division. "An Information Builders consultant created the databases and initial input screens and reports," says Clark. "The consultant's contribution was invaluable in determining which data was to be included, and how the data should be organized. Our relationship with Information Builders has always been very supportive," Clark adds.

Described by one outside observer as "the most sophisticated Maintain application to date," CCIS underwent a phase two development in the fall of 1996. "Once the original system was up and running, we could see where to go with it," says Clark. "Robert Mazur had been using the system and had suggestions for enhancement, so he and I started working together on it." Mazur handles data analysis for Wayne County and provides information and recommendations to management.

"We added a lot of information, put in more checks and balances, and different methods of cross-referencing," Clark relates. Dave Wattenburg, a senior analyst in the information processing department played a key role at this stage. "Dave helped us understand the type of data that was available on other criminal justice systems, and how we could integrate it and organize it effectively. For example, if a person is assigned to alternative workforce because they committed a minor crime, but they've skipped out on their probation for some other more serious crime, the system will flag that," Clark adds.

The biggest changes in the system came with Clark's extensive use of Maintain. "Maintain gives you the ability to write subroutines that can be reused over andover," he says. "This wasn't possible with other products I'd used in the past. I really took advantage of that feature. It saved me an enormous amount of time."

Clark also used Maintain to make the system fast and easy to use – and quite sophisticated. "Maintain provides a very nice GUI interface. I layered about six cascading windows, which adds a lot of complexity, and CCIS has pop-up lists and context-sensitive help screens," he says. Clark also minimized the amount of reading and writing to the database by using arrays to keep the data in memory, making the application faster.

FOCUS was chosen by Wayne County after evaluating other products because it could be used for quick systems development and to provide automation for different departments. "FOCUS is excellent for the mainframe environment," states Clark. "It does a lot behind the scenes."

In developing CCIS, Clark has taken advantage of many of the newer FOCUS features, including concurrent access, which allows multiple users to update the same files at the same time, and the FOCUS Accept feature, which controls validation of data going into the database. "We use FOCCALC to perform statistical calculations and we're experimenting with EDA," Clark adds.

The fact that Clark was working with Maintain when it was very new posed a few challenges along the way, but overall, development went smoothly. "Information Builders provides tremendous support," he says. "It is a very innovative company. And FOCUS is a very solid tool that beats any other product hands down."

Beating the High Cost of Jail

"CCIS is nothing less than the very lifeblood of our improved operational effectiveness," says Heard, and the evidence proves that the system plays a crucial role in the success of Wayne County's alternative workforce program.

By putting offenders who have committed minor crimes of a non-assaultive nature to work cleaning up the community instead of going to jail, the county can save a substantial amount of money while freeing up jail cells for more serious criminals. "The heart of public safety is the reduction of recidivism – or repeat offenses," explains Heard. "CCIS allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of our programs in reducing recidivism and to determine whether we should invest in more."

Plus, CCIS is instrumental in obtaining federal and state grant money to fund these programs. "While other counties are talking about tracking different kinds of information, we are already doing it," says Clark. "And that's why we're getting the grant money." And once a program is started, the system allows Wayne County to take corrective action if the program is falling short of goals and objectives. "Without CCIS, we couldn't effectively administrate our grants," says Heard.

All in all, CCIS has truly changed the face of criminal justice in Wayne County. "Jeriel Heard has used the reporting information to actually change things in the criminal justice system," says Clark. "It's opened people's eyes to the problems and inconsistencies that needed to be resolved."