New Jersey State Parole Board Livescan Upgrade

The goal of the National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP) is to improve the Nation's safety and security by enhancing the quality, completeness, and accessibility of criminal history record information and by insuring the nationwide implementation of criminal justice and noncriminal justice background check systems. BJS provides direct financial and technical assistance to the states to improve criminal history and other related records and to build their infrastructure to connect to national record check systems both to supply information and to conduct the requisite checks.

Under this award, the New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety is seeking funds to purchase ten livescan machines for New Jersey State Parole Offices. The New Jersey State Parole Board currently has four livescan machines operating in separate local District Parole Offices throughout the State. Officers use the livescans daily for address verifications and to process parolees with Megan’s Law violations, weapons and drug offenses, and other criminal violations. These machines were purchased in 2011 and run on an obsolete operating system. The machines have limited capacity and are slow to process captured data. Funds are being requested to procure ten livescan machines with updated software to replace the current outdated machines. New livescan devices will benefit the entire criminal justice information sharing community. Fingerprint data will be sent from the local District Parole Offices to the State Bureau of Identification, then forwarded to the FBI for storage in the National Crime Information Center database.

(CA/NCF)