Officer Training and Proficiency Measurements for Hawaii’s Offender Management Information System

The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.

The Hawaii’s Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) is located in the Research & Statistics Branch of the Department of the Attorney General. The Research & Statistics Branch is the state's primary source of data, analyses, and other objective information on the nature and extent of crime in Hawaii. Branch publications such as the annual “Crime in Hawaii Uniform Crime Report” and a wide variety of specialized crime-related studies provide critical, comprehensive data and analyses to the criminal justice community, academic institutions, and the general public. Staff also provide technical assistance to other criminal justice agencies and serve on several crime-related committees. Paul Perrone, Chief of Research & Statistics and the SAC Director, has directed Branch activities since 1996.

Under this award, the SAC will conduct activities under the following Core Capacity area: Measuring criminal justice system performance. The proposed project involves an expansion of features in Hawaii’s repository for administrative data on adult criminal offenders who are under the supervision of community corrections agencies. The Hawaii Department of the Attorney General will contract with the Hawaii State Judiciary, who will contract with the state’s Management Information System (MIS) vendor, Czap Inc., to expand Hawaii’s existing Offender Management Information System database. A new section of the database will be created to capture data on parole and probation officer (PO) training and proficiency levels, and a series of customizable statistical reports will be created for use by SAC researchers and authorized corrections administrators and supervisors. The new measurements will be used to assess PO training and skill levels for various evidence-based practices used in Hawaii (e.g., administering the LSI-R risk assessment instrument, motivational interviewing, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and collaborative casework). Expanding research capacity in this manner will allow the SAC to provide important new data and analyses, without having to curtail its major, related research efforts (e.g., recidivism tracking and gap analysis). This project will build on the work being completed during the current grant cycle, which involves the addition of a statistical reporting engine to the repository, plus customizable statistical reports for seven quality assurance indicators.

CA/NCF