Jennifer Cowden – Sr. Consultant

It was recently announced that the U.S. Justice Department is planning to release 6000 inmates near the end of the month due to new sentencing policies for non-violent drug-offenders.  Most of the prisoners will be placed in half-way houses and drug rehab centers as part of the “largest one-time release of federal prisoners” in U. S History, which begs the question: are these rehabilitation centers going to be ready for this sudden influx?

One state has had a similar law change recently and is rightly concerned about the impact that the new sentencing structure will have on the probation system and ancillary support services.  ProModel consultants have been working with this state’s Administrative Office of Probation to build a series of models around different aspects of the probation system.  The previous phase model studied the movement of youths through the juvenile probation system, while the model discussed in the video below addresses the adult probationer population.

In addition to gaining insight into bottlenecks in the process, the Probation Office was interested in using Predictive Analytics to assess the impact that the new law will have on the probation office workload and the local county jail occupancy rate.  As part of the law change, convicts who are guilty of certain felonies will spend part of their sentence in probation instead of spending all of it in prison.  These felons are at a higher risk level than the current average probationer,  and will likely cause a disproportionate workload increase on the probation officers as well as take up county jail space should custodial sanctions need to be implemented.  The model will be used to help quantify the increased demand so that the appropriate adjustments can be made ahead of time.

The next steps for this model is to combine it with the juvenile model in order to predict more accurately the demand on shared services and resources.