Managing Offender’s Personal Property

1. Managing Offender’s Personal Property Corrections Technology Association Charleston, SC Tuesday May 8, 2007

2. Paul CharkaviTeam Manager Offender Management SystemCorrectional Service of Canada

3. Correctional Service Canada - How We Operate • The Correctional Service of Canada is headed by a Commissioner, who reports to the Minister of Public Safety Canada. The national headquarters in Ottawa performs overall planning and policy development for the Service, while each of the five regional offices implements Correctional Service of Canada activities in facilities within the region. • On any given day, Correctional Service of Canada manages approximately 12,700 offenders inside its 58 institutions. • This represents more than 500,000 offender personnal effects to record, store and control. • Yearly, if you add 8,000 admissions, 8,000 releases and  9,950 transfers to the equation, you end up with a serious challenge in managing this amount of effects and information about them.

4. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • Prior to the Spring of 2007, Offender Personal Property was tracked and maintained using a hardcopy, manual file system. • This was one of the few operational areas that was not benefiting from electronic technology and automation. • Despite the fact that some regions and even local sites started using spreadsheet to assist with the tracking of Offender Personal Propertythe processes were dependant on manual tracking systems.

5. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • From a security standpoint, given the amount of property an offender can have at any given time, one can appreciate the need to know who has what and where it is.

6. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • In the Spring of 2007, the Correctional Service Canada implemented as part of it’s Offender Management System (OMS), the Offender Personal Property module. • It is a part of a national centralized database that is readily available to Correctional Service Canada staff. • It was designed to capture offender personal property. It stores both the description of property by category as well as an electronic image of each item(s). • The value and category of each offender’s item is captured to ensure that each offender maintains the allowable quantity and dollar values for each category of effects as outlined in our Commissioner’s Directive (Policy) CD 566-12.

7. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • It allows staff to transfer the offender effects electronically, eliminating duplication of effort between operational sites. • The OPP module enables staff to access information regarding offender personal property. • It enables Admission & Discharge Officers to accurately document and control offender personal property as outlined in policy and legislation, thereby decreasing reliance on A & D to provide detailed information to other staff. • As a result, Admission and Discharge Officers have gained time needed to focus on other security related functions. It also serves as a tool to assist in searching for effects within an institution, allowing staff who investigate Claims Against the Crown to have detailed information readily available such as the date the effect arrived, method of arrival, descriptions, an electronic image, etc.

8. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • This in turn contributes to a more secure environment for staff, offenders and the public while maintaining a higher level of data integrity and ensuring compliance with legal obligations. • This module assists in the reduction of cell loads (number of items contained in an offender cell, room/dormitory) by providing quality data that will ensure the cell contents is in accordance with policies such as the Fire and Safety Manual. This affords officers more time to perform their primary security duties such as the searching of offender property and cells. • It assists in reducing the bartering and trading of offender property and reduces the number of security concerns regarding personal property.

9. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • Implementation of this application has assisted security staff in the tracking of criminal activity, trends in offender purchasing, dollar amounts, money flow, and identifying security risks/concerns as they relate to individual offenders or groups of offenders. • The OPP application also serves as a tool to assist in policy development regarding offender personal property by providing a baseline of national data available on a continuous basis. • The application provides users with a flexible workflow, short transaction length, shallow learning curve, and very low latency ie. changes made by users should be visible to other users within approximately 15 seconds.

10. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • It provides a mechanism whereby users can enter and retrieve information about individual offender personal effects. The application enables users to exchange information about offender effects between institutions, and shall track institutional ownership of each effect. • It allows a facility to track and display status changes to individual effects, such as being placed in storage, being issued to an offender, and being destroyed (among others). • It provides users enough information to identify the owner of a given effect, whether that owner be an offender or an offender group. • Allows for the entry of purchase orders, permitting us to track the effect from the moment it is ordered by the offender.

11. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • Users are split into various roles (RBAC) based on their responsibilities and functions as related to the handling of offender’s and offender property. • They are separated into the following roles: Role 1: Admission & Discharge Management Role 2: Hobbycraft Management Role 3: Security Concern Management Role 4: Claims Management Role 5: Purchase Management Role 6: Financial Approval Role 7: Support and Quality Control

12. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • Demo of OPP

13. Managing an Offender’s Personal Property • QUESTIONS?