Florida Department of Corrections secures statewide data

Enhancing the safety of Florida's citizens with SAS^®

In a crisis, government agencies at all levels – federal, state and local – must be able to share information. Such data integration efforts, critical for maintaining national security, are under way across the United States. In fact, the Florida Department of Corrections is already realizing the many benefits of integrated information systems with SAS solutions for data warehousing and analysis.

A vital component of the state's criminal justice system, the Florida Department of Corrections strives to protect the public by operating a safe, secure, humane and efficient corrections system. To do this effectively, the department must provide quick and thorough responses to the many information requests it receives from prison and probation officials, prosecutors, state legislators, local police departments, and other government agencies.

That's why it maintains a SAS data warehouse that stores information on every inmate and offender within the state – currently numbering more than 82,000 in custody and more than 150,000 on various types of community supervision. The data warehouse also contains death and employment records, county population demographics, and juvenile justice information. To supplement its own data, the department uses SAS to access, combine and analyze data from other state agencies such as the Department of Law Enforcement, the Department of Juvenile Justice and the Department of Education. Data on the Corrections Department's work force is also maintained, with SAS drawing information from an Oracle database of all state agency staff.

"SAS gives us the ability to pull a wide variety of information together into usable data sets," explains David Ensley, Chief of Research and Data Analysis, "which means we can quickly find answers to pretty much every question that comes into our office."

Since it began using SAS in 1996, the department has substantially increased the number of standard reports and ad hoc requests that it completes for various agencies. In fact, Ensley says his team now responds to as many as 1,200 ad hoc requests per quarter with the same staffing levels it had eight years ago.

Narrowing suspect lists, implementing anti-drug policies
For example, Florida law enforcement agencies rely on the Department of Corrections for ad hoc assistance in narrowing suspect lists for serial crimes. Using SAS to access historical corrections data and analyze it for known criminal patterns and traits, the department can compile reports in a matter of hours and export them to local police and sheriff departments to assist in the search and apprehension of suspects.

SAS also makes it easy to track activities involving individual inmates, such as transfers, disciplinary actions and positive drug tests. This information can be used to match random drug testing results with demographic data, for example, so corrections officials can determine the characteristics of drug users within the system and implement new policies to reduce drug use in a prison facility.

Preparing budgets, reducing healthcare costs
SAS also supports a warehousing project for the department's financial data. The new system uses SAS/ACCESS to collect data from a Florida financial database system.

The SAS warehouse gives managers instant access to financial and budgetary information, says Kristine Dougherty, head of data administration for the Research and Data Analysis Bureau. "Financial analyses that used to take days can now be completed directly through a point-and-click interface." In fact, officials can query financial data by region and judicial circuit, or run reports for a single correctional facility.

"Like many states, Florida has been concerned with managing the rising healthcare costs within our prison facilities," says Ensley. "SAS helps us monitor changes in healthcare delivery so that administrators can identify ways to reduce those costs without compromising the health of our prisoners."

SAS/ACCESS, originally designed to handle this financial data application, is now also used to query SQL server databases and Oracle human resource data.

Monitoring performance, optimizing resources
Perhaps most important to the citizens of Florida, Ensley's group counts on SAS to create monthly and quarterly reports that track key performance indicators, including an escape report that analyzes details about attempted escapes at each of Florida's 58 correctional institutions. The information has been used to develop departmental standards, to provide information to the state's governor and legislators, and to improve agency operations.

SAS has also been used to predict individual rates of failure for offenders on community supervision, forecasting which individuals are most likely to violate the conditions of supervision set by the court. Program administrators use this information to determine which prisoners will benefit from more intensive supervision.

"The goal of that system is to supervise people on a level commensurate with their risk," explains Ensley. "For the community supervision program, we rank everyone according to their likelihood of failure, and those who are ranked more serious are assigned to officers with lower caseloads, so they can make more personal contact with the offender."

With help from SAS, the Florida Department of Corrections has witnessed the importance of combining, analyzing and interpreting data from throughout the criminal justice system – benefits that ultimately range from detecting and preventing crime to optimizing state resources. "SAS really gives us a scientific basis for allocating our resources," says Ensley. "It allows us to utilize our resources responsibly and in the best way that we can."

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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