The nexus between technology and problem solving.

• Position: Special state courts - Panel Discussion

PANELISTS

James McMillan National Center for State Courts

Robert T. Russell Buffalo Drug Treatment Court

Mina Kimmerling Rand Institute for Criminal Justice

Mark Thompson Hennepin County Community Court

James McMillan National Center for State Courts

As a public administration student, I can tell you there are really two approaches that courts have taken. One, of course, is organizational. We always try to solve problems through organization. I think that folks that have gravitated to the law and public administration have a natural tendency to look at things organizationally. I am, of course, looking at things more technologically, so information flow is really the point of my talk.

My sense of this whole movement was that problem-solving courts--I want to kind of pass this on because Judge Tauber actually helped me understand this better a couple of years ago--problem-solving courts are the courts' organizational reaction to determinate sentencing. We had to find a way to recapture discretion and flexibility in our ability to work with people. I like to look at this as an underground movement. It's very subverting, like what the legislators and the executive branch have done to the legal system. So I think that this is an incredibly fascinating way of looking at things.

Then I have to go back and say, "Well, why did prosecutors win?" Why did they win that battle back in the eighties for determinate sentencing, three-strikes-you're-out, all these types of things?

I said, "Well, is it the feeling of the legislative and executive bodies, that the prosecutors, because they are not encumbered by court rules, by rules of procedure, evidentiary rules, they have more information and hence they make better decisions?"

Well, you know, I don't think we necessarily think about that. Is there a way of dealing with it? Is it just a quick fix politically? You know, it's easy to jump onto that. That's obviously there.

Was it the fact that the prosecutors were better lobbyists? Were they just there? I would say absolutely not. I think that that is true in many states, but in other states it is not. I think the courts have a certain amount of legitimacy, and what goes on in North Carolina proves that that particular approach could be false.

But it does bother me that we have organizational trends that could also be dealt with more through information.

Let's now focus on the basis of my talk and my beliefs and the reason why I work in the court system. Better information equals better justice. I hope that that is true; that technology can eliminate the mundane; that technology eliminates all that time-sucking work of filling out forms, collecting information, and all those kinds of things; that that will enable us to spend more time communicating person-to-person.

The collected criminal information throughout the entire system is really horrible. We don't collect it well, we don't share it well. We don't even collect the right stuff. I can just go through these thing. I can go on for days about why I think criminal information systems are bad.

If you want to actually go out there and read these reports, they're sitting out there on the www.search.org Web site, these are Bureau of Justice Assistance reports on the state of criminal history repositories.

There are millions and millions of criminal convictions that are never posted to the criminal history, and it is because they have to match the actual conviction to a specific fingerprint and match it back to a specific incident. Well, it doesn't work.

I will give you a real quick example. The latest audit I saw of, say, Virginia's criminal history records, is that they are sixty-five percent complete, meaning one out of every three convictions--these are convictions--is not even posted on the criminal systems. In states it is actually thirty percent. Thirty to forty percent are the ones that are posted. That means that two out of three convictions are never in the criminal history repository.

This kind of bothers me. I don't know why. I mean, that's just one example; there's a jillion others.

One of the nice things I do like to say about community courts and drug courts and these others is that we actually have made some really good movement and certainly some real benefits in these operations.

These advances have been made in information presentation and in communication. So let me share a couple of things. This is part of my show and tell.

What's key about this is the color coding. Down here you will see color coding regarding open warrants, open cases, probation, parole, substance abuse, all these different things. I call this actually the Challenger screen. The reason why I call it the Challenger screen is that the story about the space shuttle Challenger accident was that the data was there. There was data coming in from the computer systems and from the sensors saying, "This rocket is going to blow up." But it was stuck down on this green screen over there in the corner, and it didn't sound the alarm, and there was no visual indication to the controllers to say, "Hit the eject button; have the space shuttle separate from the rockets."

So what I like to say is that the color coding, the presentation, the ability to amalgamate information, is tremendous, and this is something that I actually run around the world and tell people about, that this was actually pioneered here at the Midtown Manhattan Community Court. Now, of course, with Red Hook and all the other good work done by the Center for Court Innovation in amalgamating information, presenting information, is really tremendous.

When you are a judge, you have that benefit of experience of you being a judge of what you think works and what in your own single-person experience has worked. What we are starting to see now is information systems that are starting to collect information from all the judges in a jurisdiction and saying collectively what has worked, because, of course, different people have different ideas.

This was a submission screen just to show that there were the case charges, then it comes back and gives you a visual indication as to what type of sentencing support may work on particular types of cases. I think this first one actually is an amalgamation of all different types of sentencing that has been done. Then you start playing with the data, doing data mining and applying it to the particular case that may be in front of you.

This is just to show you another place. What is happening now, of course, out there in courts is that we're getting to be increasingly into electronic documents and the electronic world. This is a representation of the screen that you would see if you were up in Seattle, Washington, in King County Superior Court, where every document, every page of every document, is scanned into the system and linked to the case management system, so that you have that as a complete electronic record. Now you are starting to have electronic tools available to work more effectively with the information, so we are starting to see big systems be able to go completely electronic, and we're working hard on e-filing, although not in the criminal area yet, unfortunately.

That was kind of more the information presentation side. We are doing some tremendous work that is really positive, and those are areas that certainly the problem-solving courts have done some great pioneering work in.

Let me get into the communication, which is a little bit more difficult problem, because we are trying to communicate with all types of different agencies and all types of different people.

This is a representation, a kind of crude representation, of what Denver Juvenile and Family Court has up and running in Denver, Colorado. You have a whole bunch of service providers--psychologists, drug treatment counselors, all types of different people--submitting reports to the court. Of course, they are sending them in by paper, and then we get to reenter that data.

I was working there with a good friend of mine, Stephanie Rondenell. We wanted to be able to connect those people up electronically to the juvenile court and have them also have access to records there, but we wanted to do it in a secure way.

We set up basically our own Internet service provider. Basically, the service providers out there, psychologists, all they have to have is a computer which runs a browser. Then they call up and, using caller ID--and this gives us our security for very sensitive juvenile information--that would allow only the computer from that telephone to log in to the system. So we have dual levels, and of course, there is still a user name and a password. There are two different levels of security.

At that point, then, reports can be submitted, the treatment providers can see juvenile records and such. That is tremendous, and is a good way of connecting people in a place where most folks would say you can't do it because the records' security is paramount. Of course, they use e-forms. This was a demonstration.

The second thing that we're doing is trying to connect disparate agencies. This is a representation of my project down with Orlando, Florida, in Orange County. There we've got various different types of agencies trying to share information.

One of the things that we have decided to do is create what we call the Rules of the Road system where we said, Okay, we're going to create a Master Person Index. Now, this is different, significantly different, than the Criminal Name History Index. Criminal History Name Index, maintained by law enforcement, can only have names in it that have verified fingerprints.

What we did in Orange County, we would come up with an approach where we call it "the dirty database." Everybody, including those awful people called the public defenders, has the ability to query information and also enter information. You can put in information about victims, and then, you get into the relationships of...