Single Vendor Solution Yields Greater Supervision Outcomes
June 23, 2023 by Allison Catalani
How can courts, pretrial departments, and jails obtain and share the necessary data to enable judges to make more effective decisions following a criminal offense? While there is no single formula to successfully collaborate throughout the entire booking to release process, modern pretrial technology can connect the dots. But while new software systems can create efficiencies by consolidating information and connecting justice partners, how you build your interface — whether it’s through multiple vendors, a homegrown IT interface, or through a single software partner — is key to achieving greater supervision outcomes.
Consider all the steps and hands a client’s information passes through before reaching a judge: After an arrest, a new booking is created and undergoes intake. Case information then moves from the jail management system (JMS) to pretrial. A pretrial officer receives jail data, completes the Pretrial Risk Assessment (PSA) and pretrial report for the judge. The PSA and report findings are sent to the court's case management system (CMS) for the judge to decide on releasing or detaining the client.
If JMS, pretrial, and court CMS use different vendors, one system is often more robust or modern than the others, making it complex to communicate data in a timely manner and when problems arise, it can be difficult to identify where the issue lies. While a homegrown, IT-built interface may simplify communication, there are thousands of data fields to manage, limiting the availability of proficient support to troubleshoot issues, and hindering the process as data moves forward. Integration of these systems into one interface reduces complexity and facilitates easy data-sharing. Here are three reasons why a single vendor supervision solution is beneficial.
1. Consolidated, Controllable Data
With a single vendor for jail, courts, and pretrial case management, exchanging pivotal data becomes automated, faster, and easily accessible for all parties. From booking and arrest information, to hearings, terms, assessments, drug tests, offense history, and warrants — client data that is entered at any stage is updated in real time across each touch point in the system. Additionally, there are tools available to determine which specific data should be shared for clients at different stages. A court can decide if it wants to only share offenses and hearings with neighboring courts or share a full profile with a judge. By combining all information on a client into a single file, the pretrial department and the court can access the client’s full criminal history in one place, providing detailed reports for judges to leverage to make more informed pretrial decisions.
“Without a full picture of information, it makes it difficult for the judge to make an accurate decision on whether to release,” said Larry Stanton, director of sales for courts and justice software at Tyler Technologies. “If you can release the right folks, you should expect a high appearance rate while keeping communities safe.”
Sharing more accurate pretrial reports through a unified system not only leads to a balanced distribution of client release and detention rates, but also a significant decrease in failure-to-appear (FTA), ultimately fostering a safer community.
2. Solidarity in Expertise and Maintenance
A vendor-developed single interface simplifies system and data management, with one point of contact for better, faster support from intake to release. A single vendor not only has product expertise from the ground up, but they also hold more responsibility in the contract on the service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure uptime and collaboration between all systems to effectively send data back and forth. The pathway to troubleshooting any problems is usually smoother and faster versus relying on multiple vendors in potentially two different time zones or even competing companies. With systems purposely built to work together, the technology can work as intended, bringing the walls down across jails, pretrial departments, and courts, rather than creating stronger barriers.
An internally built system can also be difficult to maintain. “Oftentimes when department IT are trying to build this interface themselves, there’s a lot of stress and pressure to figure out where the problem is and they have to be an expert on both sides,” explained Stanton on the inconsistencies of turning to an internal IT department. “You have to know that code, and you better hope that one person hasn’t retired yet and has trained somebody else.”
3. Wrapping the Clients in the Right Services
With all supervision data in one unified system, jails, pretrial agencies, and the courts can get a full, accurate picture of a clients through a single profile, which in turn, makes it easier to recommend treatment providers and connect them to clients for outside rehabilitative services and treatment options upon release. By digitally entering data and automating a full profile from jail to pretrial to court, the PSA process is expedited, and a judge can accurately assess the client’s potential for release.
If a client is released while awaiting trial, a single vendor solution connects all systems to automatically update any changes in the case. Notification reminders can be sent to clients for hearings and appointments, increasing the likelihood of their attendance and reducing failure to appears. Treatment providers can provide data into the system as well, such as report cards or housing updates, creating opportunities to help steer the individual towards success in the community and prevent new crimes from being committed.