So many awesome customer stories swirl around in my notes from conferences, Web casts, customer conversations and I want to blog and Twitter about them all. I was catching up today on some news that made me a tad frustrated about how silly some of our legislative issues can be - and I thought to myself, "hey, why not blog about a positive example of government being effective for society?"
Immediately an example from SAS Global Forum earlier this year came to mind. The Court Services & Offender Supervision Agency (
CSOSA) for Washington, DC was set up in 1997 as a federal agency to help parolees avoid reincarceration and protect the community. CSOSA supervises 15,000 offenders daily. Just as every government agency under stress they are feeling the pressure to do more with less, effectively manage the offender community and enhance public safety.
In a climate where all states are being asked to ease budget strain and the expense to house inmates is under scrutiny, how can we use data to make better decisions? What best practices could other government agencies learn from CSOSA? Calvin Johnson from CSOS had such a great case study that I have kept the notes on my desk since March. Crazy huh? Well, here's the 411...
A bit about the population CSOSA manages. The average parolee is 37 years old, male. They are on probation an average of 2 years, 42% have a drug offense, 64% have substance abuse issues, and less than 39% have a high school diploma. With only 350 officers and increased demand for intervention services,how do you optimally link people to the best human services? Their solution has actually won
an award for its innovative use of SAS technology.
CSOSA started off by clearly articulating a business strategy and by going back to the basics - identifying why they exist and aligning accordingly. When they took a renewed look at their mission key themes of close monitoring, constructive engagement, partnering and risk mitigation bubbled to the top. The management team set performance metrics and knew that to be effective, technology approaches to measurement and enablement of fact based decision would drive success. Projects to measure and establish best practices would have to be mission critical and have transparency in measurement and reporting.
The case study Johnson shared demonstrates how CSOSA was able to more effectively do more with the right populations for better outcomes.
They did a risk/needs assessment that consisted of 200 questions. Assessment areas are updated on a periodic basis to reflect changes in life circumstances that may affect risk scores. Assessment profiles in combination with other history information (substance abuse history, mental health screening, etc.) were used to build definitions of risk along multiple dimensions and weight scores of offenders to adjust how intervention and management resources should be assigned.
Leveraging information from offender risk scoring, new methodologies were instituted and success could be validated. For example, low risk offenders (based on weighting and other factors) could go to kiosks at 4 sites in DC versus a face to face session with a parole officer. The parolee's hand print is scanned and then the parolee will spend about 4 minutes updating data. Random drug testing is also assigned at the kiosk for additional monitoring. One parole officer handles between 100-200 cases and use of the kiosk for low-risk offenders resulting in saving the equivalent of 1-3 Full Time officers work weeks.
Also they were able to do more effective management of higher risk offenders by leveraging high touch, high surveillance techniques such as GPS monitoring. Results from the various projects feed back into the system so that folks can be re-evaluated for risk - or so that officers can intervene before a serious violation occurs based on emerging trends.
CSOSA's Johnson mentioned some pretty cool projects coming down the pike like their portal for 700-1000 users, an executive agency dashboard to monitor key metrics and use of data mining to test and validate risk segments.
For more information on CSOSA, check out this
this article. It provides a great deal more insight to the CSOSA project and it was pretty recent too so it has even more data than was shared at the SAS Global Forum presentation. I hope to get an update soon on CSOSA's projects - it would be cool to see how much further they are down the data-based decision making path.
As Business Intelligence Product Marketing Manager for SAS, I’m responsible for the Global message direction, strategy and marketing of SAS business intelligence. More on me. About the pot pie, I'm a southern girl, and that's comfort food. But food for thought -- I can explain.