Information Systems

Law enforcement has always been a dataintensive industry. Investigating criminal activity, implementing problem-oriented policing, processing court cases, and managing correctional facilities are all heavily dependent on information for their successful operation. Until recently, however, implementing integrated information systems to better manage available data has typically been beyond the technical and fiscal reach of most organizations within the criminal justice system. Not surprisingly, the technical and fiscal constraints experienced by the criminal justice system are similar for many other organizations in the public sector.

In the early twenty-first century, however, the technical, fiscal, and management barriers to implementing integrated information systems are falling dramatically. Both hardware and application software are becoming less expensive and easier to manage, and they provide greater performance. Equally important, de facto standards have emerged over the last decade that have significantly reduced the fiscal and technical management costs of data communications (e.g., TCP/IP, HTML), operating systems (e.g., UNIX, Windows) and applications software (U.S. Department of Commerce 2000). All these factors are converging to offer new opportunities for systems development and integration for public sector organizations.

In addition to technological change, however, the structure and geographic organization of criminal justice have had profound effects on the development of information systems. The American criminal justice system comprises local, county, metropolitan, state, and federal governments. At each level of government, criminal justice agencies are typically divided along functional lines, such as police, courts, prosecution and defense, corrections, probation, and parole. The juvenile justice system, which is a separate entity, has many of the same components as the adult criminal justice system and is not discussed here. Finally, each state jurisdiction and many local ones enforce different laws and operate under different legal infrastructures. Thus, the organizational disjunctures that exist within the criminal justice system by level of government, agency function, geography, and legal structure represent not only significant potential barriers to developing integrated information systems but also a major reason to promote the development of such systems.

The Colorado Integrated Criminal Justice Information System (CICJIS) is a good example of an information system approach that provides integrated support for the criminal justice system. The system allows for information to be instantaneously moved across criminal justice agencies and departments within the state [Page 895]and greatly reduces the need for multiple entries of the same data (e.g., offender name and address) across different agencies (Holmes, Usery, and Roper 2000/2001).