New York’s Department of Probation plays a vital role working with offenders and helping them to change. It works with both the community and other justice partners to assist those on probation to become law-abiding citizens, and is a vital component of the criminal justice system for New York City.
The department is the section of New York City government responsible for providing supervision for adults and juveniles placed on probation by judges in the supreme, criminal, and family courts. Probation officers are also responsible for preparing background reports to assist judges in determining appropriate sentences for adult offenders and juvenile delinquents.
It is clearly vital for the department to be able to communicate effectively with everyone involved in criminal justice administration and to have systems that provide its officers with cost-effective, flexible and updated information. But until a few years ago, the department did not have an efficient information support system. Officers had to work with a system split up into silos and which was only partially automated. The department couldn’t keep track of accountability or carry out strategic analysis and the systems were expensive to maintain and were difficult and expensive to change.
So the department decided to completely re-engineer its IT systems, to enable its staff to share information flexibly and cost-effectively, based on an integrated case management system for both pre-sentencing investigation and probation supervision.
The department chose TCS as its partner, because of the company’s considerable experience across a number of complex governance projects around the world. The TCS team developed the new system using open source technology and the most innovative concepts in case management, as well as kiosk technology, and implemented the project with resources both in the client’s own location and remotely, from India, using its Global Network Delivery Model (GNDM™).
Its main features included integrating the new system with a customised document management process, cutting out the former dependence on physical papers, and the ability to exchange real-time data with other criminal justice agencies, including the New York police department, the department of juvenile justice and the city’s criminal justice services division. The system is able to update probation officers with the latest information, and operational forms and reports are now generated automatically. In addition, an automated system has been implemented for reports on low-risk probation clients, enabling officers to focus their time more effectively on high-risk, violent offenders and sex offenders. The system also provides reports enabling managers to measure operational efficiency and analyse the city’s criminal trends.
The TCS team drew upon the expertise of colleagues in the TCS performance engineering group to help plan and fine-tune the new system and the project was delivered a month and a half ahead of schedule.
The main benefits of the new system include:
- Streamlined business processes for planning, developing and providing a quality service, enabling the department to complete investigations faster and on-time
- Successful prosecution of the probationers violating the conditions of probation due to the collaborative information sharing and enhanced record management
- Intelligent reporting mechanism that enables probation officers to make appropriate referrals to various rehabilitation and employment programs so that those on probation can be brought back to mainstream society as soon as possible
- Management reporting and trend analysis capabilities
- Proper manageability and tracking of probation cases
- Lower operating costs
- Increase in the delivery of pre-sentence investigation reports on time from 70% to 100%
- Reduction in the training needs of new officers
- Speed of operations while ensuring authenticity and timeliness due to the automatic information gathering from external partners and electronic dissemination of information
Alphonzo Albright, the deputy commissioner and chief information officer of New York City’s Department of Probation, says it has been a “great pleasure” working with TCS over the past three years on the successful development of the new case management system. Combining the skills of the department with those of TCS has, he says, delivered “a tangible solution for years to come”.
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