Data integration for the Thomas Jefferson area community criminal justice system

The focus of this project is to facilitate program evaluation by creating a database that captures data about incidents, offenders, and offenses across the entire criminal justice system, while complying with national justice information sharing standards and maintaining individual stakeholders´ legacy data systems. Current systems support individual functions and were not designed for cross-functional analysis. The Charlottesville and Albemarle criminal justice system needs the ability to store and analyze longitudinal data in order to identify appropriate and effective interventions, and support evidence-based decisions. The proposed solution is an integrated database with a SQL back end and a SharePoint front end. The pilot database, developed this year, contains select data fields from the police, the jail, and the city commonwealth attorney´s data systems. The long-term goal of this project is the completion of an integrated database including all criminal justice stakeholders in the Thomas Jefferson Area Community Criminal Justice System. A data-sharing system available to all of these agencies will enable many questions to be answered with evidence-based reasoning. For example, some agencies would like to know the average time between arrest and sentencing for a specific crime and how different sentence lengths for similar crimes affect recidivism rates of offenders. Eventually, with all agencies in the criminal justice community included, the usefulness of such a datasharing system extends far beyond these examples. The National Criminal Justice Association (NCJA) aims for the final system to be replicated in other jurisdictions nationwide.