Effective Case Management Efforts through Quality Assurance Monitoring

The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.

The State of Hawaii’s Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) is located in the Research & Statistics Branch, Crime Prevention & Justice Assistance Division, of the Department of the Attorney General. The Research & Statistics Branch is Hawaii’s primary source of data, analyses, and other objective information on the nature and extent of crime in Hawaii. Branch publications such as the annual “Crime in Hawaii Uniform Crime Report” and a wide variety of specialized crime-related studies provide critical, comprehensive data and analyses to the criminal justice community, academic institutions, and the general public. Staff also provide technical assistance to other criminal justice agencies and serve on several crime-related committees. The SAC Director, who is also the Chief of Research & Statistics, has directed Branch activities since 1996.

Under this award, the SAC will conduct activities under the following Core Capacity area: Measuring criminal justice system performance. The proposed project will expand Hawaii’s capacity to produce and consider statistical information pertaining to adult parolees and felony probationers and the State’s efforts to reduce recidivism rates among these groups via the use of evidence-based practices. Building on complementary efforts made in the previous three SJS grant cycles, the new project will create additional statistical features and functionality for the Interagency Council on Intermediate Sanctions’ Computerized Management Information System (ICIS-MIS). ICIS membership includes the State’s Departments of Public Safety, Health, and the Attorney General (which includes both the SAC and SAA); the Hawaii Paroling Authority; and the Hawaii State Judiciary. The enhancements to the ICIS-MIS will provide a variety of graphical and summarized statistics on individual officers’ and supervision units’ offender caseloads, quality assurance metrics, and recidivism risk assessments. This information will be used directly by parole and probation administrators, unit supervisors, and line-level staff in order to improve their operations and monitoring thereof, and by SAC researchers to report to ICIS on the data globally and at various other levels of analysis. Without this automated functionality, it would require considerable time and reprioritization for the SAC to conduct even “one-time” studies that address any of these new areas of statistical inquiry. Funding is also being requested for in-state travel costs and travel expenses to attend the 2019 ASUCRP Conference.

(CA/NCF)