Data integration in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail: A systems engineering approach to support Evidence-based decision making

The criminal justice system in the greater Albemarle-Charlottesville area faces a number of challenges common to many communities, including frequent overcrowding at the regional jail and data systems that obstruct analysis needed to identify causes of and remedies for overcrowding. The Community Criminal Justice Board (CCJB) would like to make evidence-based decisions, but doing so requires analysis that existing data systems do not support. Evidence-based decision making, enabled through the data integration effort described in this paper, can lead to a safer and more cost-effective criminal justice system in the Charlottesville community. This paper discusses several implementation issues within the Charlottesville justice system and the integration of extracts from existing databases into a single database that can support evidence-based decision making. The two major challenges in designing and implementing a functional analysis database are 1) lack of a universal identifier to track offenders throughout the criminal justice system and 2) absence of essential data fields necessary to answer important program related questions. The paper includes discussion of a detailed architecture of a proposed system through which data can be extracted from various databases associated with the Albemarle-Charlottesville criminal justice system. This will demonstrate how, with the use of a universal identifier, these data can be aggregated from the various databases and used for evidence-based decision making in the criminal justice system.