Effective use of information is key to optimizing governmental agencies, allowing them to do more - with less. 

In addition to the normal challenges of managing organizations, managers in governmental organizations face the challenge of balancing constituent welfare with constantly shifting budgets and funding. Dataspace recognizes the challenges and opportunities inherent in the government sector and has developed a track record of success in this arena. 

Some of our biggest successes in the governmental arena surround systems that enable counties to optimize the use of their jail facilities and reduce overcrowding.

For one county in Michigan, the situation was as follows:

As in many locales, the County jail runs dangerously close to its statutory capacity. According to state and federal guidelines, if the jail population exceeds the statutory capacity for 10 consecutive days, the County Sheriff must declare a state of emergency. The jail is then required to immediately reduce its population to 90 percent of capacity potentially resulting in the early release of 200, or more inmates.  If county officials are unable to precisely manage sentencing and release guidelines, they face a difficult choice: Either risk early release of dangerous criminals and the related public safety implications OR overbuild inmate housing facilities, spending precious budget dollars on unused capacity. The ability for the Sheriff’s Department to analyze facility usage data is essential in order to establish if the County has too much or too little housing for inmates. Through this analysis, the County can plan for and isolate overcrowding in higher volume facilities.  It can also better manage the day to day operations of its jail facilities.

The County in question looked to Dataspace to design, develop, and deploy a Jail Reporting System for county officials.  The goal of this project was to enhance the Criminal Courts Reporting System - enabling authorized personnel from the County Courts system and the County Sheriff’s Department to extract information to determine if corrective actions must be taken to address problems – before they occur. Needed data was integrated from the Court Management System, the Jail Administration Management Systems, as well as mainframes at both the Circuit Court and District Court levels. The resulting data warehouse is accessible by end user query tools and has been a resounding success.

The data mart delivered by Dataspace was the key element in preventing the County’s first-ever emergency jail population reduction in 2003. Additionally, overall average length of stay for all inmates was reduced by a whopping 14 days, from 70 to 56 between the first to the third quarters of 2003. At a cost of $80/day per inmate housed, this translates to a savings of approximately $2 Million just in the third quarter. Prior to the data mart, jail administrators were unable to determine average lengths of stay. This data mart provided the necessary information to the County, which in the end saved millions of dollars.