Corrections_Today_March_April_2020_Volume 82, Number 2

Figure 3: The graphical user interface of IADSS

Figure courtesy Pennsylvania Department of Corrections

User-friendly web application –– A web-based GUI is developed as part of the IADSS to enable the user to interact with the system. Figure 3 shows a screenshot of the GUI. –– The IADSS collects all the personal and sentence information needed for the assignment of an inmate from the PADOC databases and displays it in the GUI to facilitate the review of the assignment. –– The IADSS reports the program waiting lists to alert the Bureau of Treatment Services about current and future bottlenecks in program schedules and availability. Security enhancement Security enhancement is hard to quantify; however, it was a major motivation for initiating this project. The use of IADSS at the PADOC resulted in the following secu- rity enhancements:

–– Three geographial regions (west, central, east) are defined in PA counties, and SCIs are placed in one of these three regions. Because of the com- plexity of considering the distance of the home county to the SCIs, only the distance of the home region to the SCIs was considered originally. The IADSS enables the PADOC to minimize the actual distance of the home county to the SCIs for each inmate. –– The rate of acceptance of the simultaneous assignments and individual assignments was measured to ensure that the IADSS appropriately captures the hierarchy of the factors of the assignment. In January 2017, more than 95% of the inmates were assigned to the SCIs recommended by the IADSS. The remaining inmates who were assigned to other SCIs were assigned either due to data inconsistencies or special conditions of those inmates.

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