Charged with oversight of more than 3,500 youthful parolees at any one time, an agency’s juvenile parole division in California employs over 200 parole agents and administrative staff charged with protecting the public and helping young parolees reenter their communities.
Operating from 14 offices statewide, the division must work closely with law enforcement agencies, the courts, district attorneys, public defenders, county probation staff, and a spectrum of public and private agencies.
The largest youthful offender program in the nation, this division emphasizes public protection and offender accountability. This requires keeping constant tabs on each youth released to parole.
Parole agents work with the parolees both individually and in small groups, with especially intense supervision during the first 90 days after release from institutional custody. Agents assist with intensive re-entry services, including residential placement, family counseling, job development and placement, and school enrollment.
The average parolee is 19 years old, although the division works with youths and young adults from 12 to 25. Parolees’ pasts include a broad range of crimes as well as issues like family problems, alcoholism, drugs and gang entrenchment. Some are confused and scared. Others are tough and cynical. Typically parole agents have 45 to 55 youths under their supervision at any given time, often spread across multiple counties.
As a condition of their release, parolees make certain promises, such as staying in school, attending individual rehabilitation programs and avoiding gangs. Parole agents monitor to make sure these promises are kept.
The parolee’s monitoring is documented through contact reports, arrest warrant requests, case files, quarterly and annual reviews, and more. Parole services is an information intensive business.
A business manager for the division said the movement towards an ink-enabled (able to work with handwritten input) slate tablet from Motion® Computing was conceived four years earlier. That’s when the overseeing agency launched a working group to manage its Field Information System (FIS) aimed at automating casework records for all of the division’s parolees statewide.
The initial design of the automated system included an Intermec handheld unit for use in the field. The business manager said that this solution quickly proved to be obsolete because the small handhelds had limited capabilities and were out of production. In fact, service was no longer available. A more capable unit was needed to interface with the agency’s new PC-based infrastructure.
Second, field agents were asking for a solution with more power and mobility. The current system didn’t have enough capacity and the Intermec device had to be individually synchronized weekly with the agency’s FIS database. In addition, the agents found keyboards on the old units too small.
Third, the new mobile solution would need to be easily used by branch staff and field agents who have a wide range of technical expertise. Some agents feel very comfortable in a technical environment, while others prefer not even to type their own input.
Finally, FIS automated field information that was previously stored in heavy binders up to eight inches thick into a Web-based system. The division needed a solution that would take full advantage of the agency’s new PC-based infrastructure, including real-time access to the field book information. The old Intermec units couldn’t handle that job.
In the midst of the FIS pilot the entire Juvenile Justice Department made a decision to transition from the existing Apple platform to a PC platform. Because all desktop computing hardware had to be replaced throughout the Department, this created an opportunity for the division to upgrade the Intermec device to a full PC for use in the field.
The idea to move to Motion’s tablet PC came from a parole agent who attended a technology trade show. There, he saw Motion’s ink-enabled tablet PC, the model M1400 with View Anywhere display technology for indoor-outdoor viewing.
On returning to work, he recommended to the overseeing agency consideration of Motion’s tablet PCs. Motion’s product answered the agency’s challenge: an ultramobile PC-based computing platform with plenty of capacity, wireless capabilities, speech recognition and ink-enabled.
The agency immediately saw the advantages, but California has strict information technology procurement protocols. The agency began investigating the possibilities.
“We are very careful how we spend state funds for IT,” said the business manager. “One thing that made Motion advantageous was that Dell also recommended it. Dell is one of our established suppliers and a designated procurement source.”
“It was kind of like the stars aligned,” she said.
The division began by deploying 50 Motion M1400 tablets to management, administrative staff and selected field agents in the fall of 2004. Then, 129 more Motion tablet computers were acquired for distribution to the rest of the force.
Motion backed the deployment with training. Acceptance of the Motion M1400s has been very positive, and it is apparent to all that the division has just scratched the surface on what tablet PCs eventually can do for the agency.
For example, as additional encryption capabilities are added to the agency’s IT infrastructure, wireless access will soon be available statewide. Through Motion tablet PCs, all agents, administrators and managers wherever they are will have real-time access to the division’s information technology system.
“Sure, this will increase agents’ productivity,” said the business manager, “but more importantly it will let agents do real-time work in the field, spend more time with youthful offenders in the field and make information immediately available to law enforcement.”
One parole agent was a long-time Apple user and he was skeptical. But now, after using a Motion M1400 for just a few weeks, he is excited about what Motion can do for the field force.
“Somebody did something right when they selected this,” he said, a 24-year veteran of youth programs, including eight years as a parole agent. He gives a long list of reasons to support his enthusiasm.
“It’s a handheld device. It’s a laptop. It’s a desktop. It’s even a notepad,” he said, “and it’s user friendly the way the whole thing was laid out.”
One of the parole agent’s first questions was about integrating the tablet’s voice recognition capabilities with the division’s contact report templates. Motion representatives showed him how after “training” the M1400 to his voice, he could call up a report template, use a stylus to touch the appropriate line, and then just dictate his input.
The parole agent estimates paperwork that once took two hours to complete now can be done in as little as 30 minutes, using the dictation feature.
Another question he had was about using databases to fill in forms. He believed he could further reduce his two-hour paperwork project to as little as 15 minutes by applying an Access database. Because Motion’s products are compatible with any PC software running on Microsoft Windows XP, it took just minutes to add Access to his tablet PC and thereby let him customize his use of the M1400’s capabilities.
“You can basically design it to do anything,” the parole agent said. “You could customize for your style, your workload, your way of doing things.”
He is especially looking forward to the agency’s activation of the M1400’s wireless features. Currently, agents must tie directly to the Field Information System, enter their data, and synchronize the information.
“Once things are wireless, I’ll be working off the server in real time,” he said, “No need to upload, download or anything else.”
Prior to introduction of the new FIS and Motion tablets, he spent 60 percent of his time on paperwork. With the Motion computer, he estimates he can reduce paperwork to about 20 percent of his time.
“When I really catch onto all that this thing can do, maybe I can spend even less time doing paperwork and go out and do what really needs to be done: spend more time with these kids. We are onto something that will really streamline our process,” he said. “We are just overloaded. For us to do the job right, we need these tools.”
The business manager echoes the parole agent’s views, saying that the division is just now beginning to exploit the Motion computer’s capabilities.
She said agents who don’t type fast or well will now have the option of handwriting their input or using voice recognition, freeing up overloaded administrative staffers who today spend 10 to 15 percent of their time transcribing and correcting agents’ dictated reports.
She also notes that larger storage capacity on the new Motion computers will even allow agents to electronically add photos to case files.
And she’s confident that once security protocols are in place within a few months, agents will begin gaining wireless real-time access to FIS from the field.
Access to real-time information is the real payback for modernizing the agency’s infrastructure and providing agents with Motion M1400s. “For us, it’s all about public safety,” the business manager said. “And anything that provides more information more readily to our agents and law enforcement is well worth it.”