Data integration for the Thomas Jefferson area community criminal justice system

Abstract

The focus of this project is to facilitate program evaluation by creating a database that captures data about incidents, offenders, and offenses across the entire criminal justice system, while complying with national justice information sharing standards and maintaining individual stakeholders' legacy data systems. Current systems support individual functions and were not designed for cross-functional analysis. The Charlottesville and Albemarle criminal justice system needs the ability to store and analyze longitudinal data in order to identify appropriate and effective interventions, and support evidence-based decisions. The proposed solution is an integrated database with a SQL back end and a SharePoint front end. The pilot database, developed this year, contains select data fields from the police, the jail, and the city commonwealth attorney's data systems. The long-term goal of this project is the completion of an integrated database including all criminal justice stakeholders in the Thomas Jefferson Area Community Criminal Justice System. A data-sharing system available to all of these agencies will enable many questions to be answered with evidence-based reasoning. For example, some agencies would like to know the average time between arrest and sentencing for a specific crime and how different sentence lengths for similar crimes affect recidivism rates of offenders. Eventually, with all agencies in the criminal justice community included, the usefulness of such a datasharing system extends far beyond these examples. The National Criminal Justice Association (NCJA) aims for the final system to be replicated in other jurisdictions nationwide.