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
decision are based on data and user focused.

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

Workstream
Build
agile
development

Goals during this phase

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

Measure

Determine feasibility of and execute programmatic FTA counts to calculate real

data driven

FTA

Learn

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

user centered

Week ending 02/19/2016

Our second week in Salt Lake County, afforded us the opportunity to dive deeper into some target research aims,
namely beginning to perform regular long-form user research interviews with clients at CJS as well as engage directly
with Information Systems and data research staff to gain access to data sources we have identified as critical to
provisioning useful notification services.

Highlights
Observed roughly eight Jail Screenings, nine Pretrial intake appointments and interviewed seven CJS
pretrial clients
Toured Salt Lake County Jail, observing, in-depth, the CJS intake interview component
Attended Homeless Court, presided over by Judge Baxter and saw how the he worked to make the
system functional in the context of this vulnerable population, adapting mandatory punishments so that they
would be not just reasonable, but achievable.
Key meetings with the DA and Information Systems resulted in invaluable diagrams of the IJIS system,
and critical discussion of how to pursue data access to key court and jail data, in support of the in-process BAA.
Meeting with Behavioral Health administration and Irene at CJS allowed us to better understand
complexities around Behavioral Health data and how that plays into overall complexities of IJIS data access
requests.

Observations
The high volume of individuals processed at the County Jail makes this location a potential access
point through which to engage users with our SMS tool to onboard them in order to cultivate a research
population.
Pedestrian traffic violations make up a very high proportion of the Homeless Courts charges for
clients, highlighting the tense relationship between the population and new(er) gentrifying forces in downtown.
Client interviews reveal different needs and attitudes towards the Justice System, which mean we may
need to support different people in different ways to fully address the issues of FTAs and recidivism
Two out of the seven pieces of information that impact FTA and recidivation risk assessment are selfreported

Quotes
People forget their court appointments?... Thats just what they want you to think! Reminding
people about their court dates is not the only reason people FTA. - CJS Pretrial Intake Client
Theres nothing typical here. - Intake screener regarding jail intake process

What I do here is not a solution. What I do here is resolve a backlog in the system. - Judge Baxter,
Homeless Court
We need to have the beds for the felons. - Intake screener discussing overcrowding releases (OCR)
We would significantly decrease the FTA rate - even among the homeless population - with these kind
of tools. - Judge Baxter on SMS notification service

Workstrea
m

This weeks accomplishments

Next weeks objectives

Build

Identified statewide public court

hearing schedules in .pdf

Walked through technical

underpinnings of C-Tracks system

Created base components of SMS

system

Write extraction script to

retrieve court dates from published
PDFs

Complete operational base SMS

tool

Measure

Identified the upstream source of

court data as CORIS

Initiate contact with CORIS

administrators, establishing data
sharing arrangements

Draft, send data access request

form to State

Learn

Conducted interviews with CJS staff

Conducted pretrial user interviews
Observed multiple court sessions

Continue interviews with staff,

clients and stakeholders

Gather demographics data,

propose research population distribution
targets

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:
Please let us know what you think and if you find the new format valuable. Weve arranged it with an
eye to making the report shareable so that others can quickly understand the report on their own.
We have been working aggressively to gain access to Court data from the technical side. Jon from IS
and Irene from CJAC have been very helpful in leading the way towards contacting the appropriate people on
the IT side of the Court database system. If there is someone in a leadership position in the Court system that
you think would be well suited to assisting us in gaining direct access to court data information, we would be
keen to speak to that person.
Continued support on fast-tracking the BAA for access to key identified databases resources (most
importantly, Court, Jail, and CJS).
Thanks,
Kuan and Code for America, Team Salt Lake County