Fellowship Status Report

Code for America is partnering with Salt Lake County to build technology solutions to improve services and strengthen
the relationship between the county and its citizens, with an aim to lower the rate at which citizens fail to appear (FTA)
in court, supervision and treatment appointments in addition to lowering the recidivism rate. In order to accomplish
these objectives we pursue three workstreams - build, measure, learn - to insure we iterate quickly and that our
decisions are based on data and user focused.

Phase II - Residency (02/06/2016 to 03/06/2016)

Workstream

Goals during this phase

Build
agile development
Measure
data-driven decisionmaking
Learn
user centered
design

Understand and connect data sources to support the functionality of an SMS

reminder tool

Build an SMS (text-messaging) tool that notifies of upcoming court hearings

Determine feasibility of measuring FTA

Programmatically measure FTA count and rate over time

Understand the justice system, how people move through it, and their
attitudes and behaviors towards it

Identify opportunities to design and build ways to make the process more
efficient and easier to successfully navigate

Week ending 02/26/2016

In our third week in Salt Lake County, we had the opportunity to begin operationalizing a number of components of our
first two weeks of research. In addition to making a number of valuable leadership connections in terms of data access
advancements, we also had the opportunity to host successful user engagement events, as well as field a visit from
our Focus Area lead, Jenny Montoya Tansey, from Code for America headquarters in San Francisco. In addition, we
engaged further in the community, beginning discussions on how to best involve ourselves in the CourtHack and
CodeAcross events happening this upcoming weekend, as well as an enjoyable meet and greet with technical
leadership from those at the local Goldman Sachs offices in downtown Salt Lake City.

Highlights
Ran a 40-plus employee participatory mapping research event to identify pain, success, and
opportunity points on 13-foot printouts of the Criminal Justice Services (CJS) system flow that we diagrammed.
Met with the District Attorney, a Drug Court Judge, and continued to observe additional court sessions.
Participated in an evening ride along with Intensive Supervision Probation officers to observe
relationship between client home life and CJS organization.
Participated in cross-organizational meeting with leaders from Mayors office, County Sheriff, Unified
Police Department, and Criminal Justice Services; identified a stop-gap solution to recent overcrowding-related
changes in the jail booking process.
Launched a Tumblr (http://c4a-slc.tumblr.com/) to supplement weekly reports, improve transparency,
andenable easy sharing.
Met with a vendor representative who will be implementing a new database and software management
system.
Met with CJS therapy case managers and peer support staff to understand the role addiction plays with
client behavior and attitudes towards the justice system.

Observations
Text check-ins with clients already happen at CJS with some clients on a single smartphone passed
around all related case managers. One hearing-impaired client exclusively texts with his/her case manager to
check-in instead of using the phone system.
Limitations with regards to the current availability of court data as it is (or is not) propagated through
County systems consistently seems to be crux at which systems break down in County organizations.
Intensive Supervision Probation (ISP) officers and Peer Support staff at CJS use texting to stay in
frequent contact with clients to build rapport and give support.
CJS case managers have reached out to ISP officers to visit their noncompliant clients with great
results. 8 of 10 of the noncompliant clients they reach out to call their case managers right away.
In court, one of the defendants who was supposed to appear did not appear because he/she had died
from a drug overdose while on probation.

Quotes

People get lost to us if they dont have good numbers for them, (we) need more accurate contact
information. - Pretrial supervisor
Our statistics never change. Were just always full. Thats it. - County Sheriff leadership
No, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had a lot of stuff going on at the time. - CJS Pretrial intake
client, discussing a 4-month period of failing to appear
Everyone has their smartphone now. The platform is there to cement that connection. How do I get
the dataset to establish in a systematic way that contact to people? - District Attorney Sim Gill
Its actually better to do [check-ins] by text instead of calling in. - Kim Swensen, Pretrial surrender
coordinator
[This is the] first time in a long time. I'm doing good Im proud of myself - Pretrial supervision client
My friend was like thats not your friend, thats your PO and I was like no, thats my buddy. - ISP
client
Supervision is one of the hallmarks of court, in terms of success. - Drug Court Judge Skanchy

Notes from CJS Mapping Workshop

-

Whats the point of overcrowding release for probation warrants? The point of sending a probation

client to jail is a sanction that doesnt happen if the jail turns him away. - Probation case manager
Why cant [the system] roll in information to pre-sentence etc like pretrial, probation, pretrial
release? ...That would change lives. - Probation case manager
The client doesnt attend their hearing because the case manager cant get in touch with them. This
can happen because the client is homeless, the client has transportation barrier, or the client just decided not
to show. - Pretrial case manager
CJS screens out high- risk clients but can still end up supervising them, due to the judge ordering
clients to pretrial. - Pretrial case manager

Workstrea
m

This weeks
accomplishments

Next weeks objectives

Build

Write extraction
script to retrieve court
dates from published
PDFs

Complete operational base SMS tool

Deploy operational base SMS tool to hosted

production environment

Establish programmatic access to CJS-IJIS server

via VPN

Reconfigure Utah Court Calendar Service to extract

data from CJS-IJIS instead of from PDFs

Measure

Initiate contact
with CORIS
administrators,
establishing data
sharing arrangements

Sign and return county-level BAA (data sharing

agreement)

Determine if CJS-IJIS server can be used to

measure FTA

Follow-up w/ CORIS administrators about data

needs

Learn

Continue
interviews with staff,
clients and
stakeholders

Gather CJS
population
demographics

Propose research population distribution

targets

Collect all system pain points in single

document

Identify target long-term user groups to follow

Schedule and conduct additional interviews with

staff, clients and stakeholders

Partner Support
We have received a great deal of support, especially at the Mayors staff level during the month of February. This has
helped us move quickly, and has opened doors that has made approaching new organizations and aspects of the
County government possible on a rapid turnaround schedule. With that said we do have a few final closing requests for
the week:
Continued support as we move forward with Court data access strategies
Continued support on fast-tracking the BAA for access to key data resources (most importantly, Court,
Jail, and CJS)
Thanks,

Kuan and Code for America, Team Salt Lake County