Oregon Department of Corrections Measures Up with SAS®

SAS Analyzes Inmate Data Alongside Fiscal and HR Data

Hoping to increase system efficiencies and improve prisoner success rates, many state and county corrections systems provide education, life and work skills, and alcohol and drug treatment programs. But oftentimes, those who are footing the bill – voters, state legislatures and county budgeting offices – question the effectiveness of these programs.

In Oregon, those questions are being addressed with the help of SAS. Questions like: Are education and treatment programs reducing prison cycles? Are cognitive programs decreasing inmate-on-staff assaults? Are department operations fiscally sound? Is recidivism dropping? The Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) Research and Evaluation unit can assist in answering these and other questions with a new system that uses SAS for data warehousing and analysis.

"There is quite a bit of pressure from the legislature to prove our institution and community programs are effective," explains Laura Buring, database analyst with the ODOC. During a recent legislative session $20 million in funding for correctional programs was restored only after the department agreed to provide performance measures for its programs. "Institutional programs are expensive," says Buring, "But with SAS, we can see which ones are working and which ones are not. One of our goals is to break the cycle of criminality, and we're using SAS to evaluate the success of that goal."

According to Buring, prison managers have a strong need to combine offender information and program data with fiscal, departmental and human resources data. Buring and Don Pack, also a database analyst in the Research and Evaluation unit, are using SAS to build a data warehouse that will streamline information management and provide a foundation for sharing knowledge throughout the state corrections system.

"Administrators are definitely ready to have management information on their desktops," says Nick Armenakis, interim director of the Oregon Department of Corrections. He looks forward to making effective policy decisions based on timely and complete information from all of the department's divisions. "Providing information to the legislature on issues that are important to the citizens of Oregon will be easier than ever before," says Armenakis.

Pack agrees. "With SAS, we can monitor corrections programs using whatever success criteria the legislature and DOC have defined, and prison officials can use the results to really understand what's going on in the system."

Meeting Inmate Needs, Improving Productivity
Currently, department officials are advocating a unique corrections plan for every inmate. After assessing the individual needs of each inmate, these ambitious plans create a map to address those needs during incarceration and parole. Tracking the overall success rates of the incarceration plans will involve complicated analyses of multiple programs alongside release and recidivism data on thousands of inmates – a mountain of information that resides in a variety of databases throughout the state. But Pack is confident that SAS is up to the task.

"We're banking on the fact that SAS can access data from anywhere and bring it all together into one cohesive system," says Pack. "That has been our experience so far with data that we load nightly from several databases residing on different platforms. We hope to gather information from other state agencies, including the Department of Administrative Services, local law enforcement agencies and the judicial system. But SAS has the ability to do pretty much anything we need."

Having information centrally located is important, explains Buring. In fact, the benefits extend beyond sharing inmate and program information. While some of their warehousing plans are still in development, Buring says the department has already seen huge benefits from the analytic power of SAS, including productivity gains above 25 percent for the Research and Evaluation unit.

"Since implementing SAS, the research unit spends less time doing ad hoc queries and more time doing complex evaluation work," says Buring. "They used to spend weeks doing routine reporting, and now it's basically running by itself."

Likewise, Buring appreciates the data management and data presentation capabilities of SAS. "There are so many different ways to analyze and present data with SAS," she says. "It's easy to present information and send it to a variety of users in different formats, including spreadsheets, Word and PDF documents, or Web interfaces."

The department's data warehouse currently contains 32 gigabytes of data with 15 gigabytes that automatically refresh nightly. Recently, the entire corrections system made a hardware transition from Sun to Windows. According to Pack, the flexibility of SAS made the switch from a Sun UNIX platform to Windows Server 2000 an easy one. "The way SAS is setup, we simply install the software, copy the library, redo a few UNIX scripts, and it runs. Now we're much cheaper on hardware and everything we designed in SAS still operates the same."

SAS Pilot Program Offers Guaranteed Results
By taking advantage of the SAS pilot program for U.S. Government and Education customers, the ODOC was guaranteed real results within five to 10 days. The program offers a period of training and support that teaches customers how to maintain and expand their solution independently.

"The pilot program was great," says Buring. "It proved to us that SAS was the right solution and offered immediate results for us to present to managers." During the pilot phase, SAS systems engineers installed the software, configured the data and provided examples for every type of graph and report that Buring and Pack might need.

"They did a representative piece of work for every phase of our project," says Pack. "From the extracting and loading of data to the display on the Web, they provided working examples of the whole life cycle."

According to Buring, the pilot program is just one expression of the partnership they've built with SAS. "The nice thing about SAS in general is that you always feel like you're working together. We have reliable support and we never feel like we've been hung out to dry. From working through budgeting issues to answering technical questions, everyone at SAS has been very supportive."

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