The Truth About Juvenile Justice Data Collection
By Drew Shover
Juvenile justice data collection at the local and state levels remain challenging because of lack of data implementation strategy and buy-in from officers. Both state and local jurisdictions strive to improve their practices but still face barriers to collecting consistent information. However, jurisdictions do not prioritize juvenile justice data collection because they are consumed with issues within their community, leaving data entry for when they can complete it. This often leaves us questioning the accuracy of the reports or whether we should bother collecting it.
Juvenile probation officers face community and case management challenges daily. They must preserve public safety and rehabilitate the individuals in their care while juggling multiple tasks, making data entry an unwanted burden. At the probation administrative level, their roles focus on managing office duties, turnover, supporting officers, case management, and overseeing outcomes for their community and elected officials. As one can infer, probation administrative officers regularly need to evaluate outcomes using data systems to perform well in their roles. Unfortunately, they are often in survival mode, and managing outcomes often falls to the bottom of the list. This challenge can become even more complicated when information and processes are disconnected between probation and juvenile facilities, something we’ve explored in more detail in Where Probation and Insitutions Disconnect–and Why It Matters.
Probation administrators interview prospective officers who say, “I want to help people.” This is true for anyone entering a public service role. However, after being hired, officers quickly learn that the position is far more complex than simply helping people. Once on the job, they must follow policies and procedures, including juvenile justice data collection, that disconnect them from what brought them to the profession. As a result, staff seem to have no middle ground. Data entry becomes daunting and stressful, causing frustration and conflict across the organization.
Collecting statewide juvenile justice data is also essential to support evidence-based practices, policy, lawmaking, assess trends and patterns, ensure accountability, promote equity and equality, evaluate racial disparities, and secure funding opportunities for the state. Controversially, the state may overlook user feedback when systems are cumbersome and not user friendly. However, jurisdictions do not always account for the state’s jurisdictional diversity, which makes it difficult to build a system that serves all areas of the state. As a result, they reach an impasse, and the two entities may disengage despite relying on each other.
Both areas within the juvenile justice system are staffed by inquisitive, hard-working, and dedicated personnel who may not reap the fruits of their labor. Probation staff may lose sight of the analytical benefits of data collection, and the state may not receive the data it needs to understand jurisdictional challenges. Consequently, state-developed systems may lack buy-in because staff do not want to use them and are not informed of the specific purpose of juvenile justice data collection.
Building a Data Culture That Works
Data does not enter itself, and the only way to match numbers with stories is to have holistic data management. This involves training, supporting, cleaning, and dissemination to define purpose. Each area is vital to understanding commonalities and differences within groups and sharing accurate information with all community partners. However, this cannot happen without the right people overseeing the data. Without proper support, it becomes numbers on a report.
Data integrity lives and breathes within a jurisdiction. The state cannot assume responsibility for local information collection; each jurisdiction must choose how to collect and apply its data to strengthen its organizational data culture through leadership.
When building a progressive data culture within a jurisdiction, leadership must be prepared to answer a few simple questions from their stakeholders:
- How is our data being used to serve our community and families?
- How do we monitor the data for accuracy?
- What does the data we collect mean?
- How does this system help me?
Jurisdictions overlook data culture as a workplace barrier, and it requires direct attention. They lack insight into how a poor data culture prevents data entry, and they must attend to their primary daily duties. This causes administrators to miss opportunities to engage their entire, multi-generational teams.
All generations of juvenile officers need leadership to share knowledge, help them understand the “why” behind their requirements, train them according to their learning modalities, and lead them as purpose-driven professionals. Consequently, if we cannot answer the above questions, officers default to their own collection methods, and data entry is no longer a priority.
Making Dual Entry Work
It is an interesting conversation about how juvenile justice organizations collect their data. Their responses trouble those who oversee data collection systems. In these discussions, officers are very proud of their spreadsheets, binders, and wall-mounted dry-erase boards. Agreeably, they should be proud of these methods because they take the initiative to track their work and document their efforts as juvenile officers. However, the information stays with each officer. Ultimately, the jurisdiction lacks a shared centralized juvenile justice data collection method, and those who collect the information may not know how to interpret it.
Analytics professionals analyze data to identify jurisdictional trends and patterns and apply them to the community’s needs. State data professionals interpret what is received. However, they may not know the data’s accuracy and take it at face value. By contrast, local jurisdictions lack a system to export information immediately to identify inaccuracies, and they may need training to evaluate the data. As a common response, the jurisdiction requests information from the state and receives it in an unfamiliar format that requires additional time to explain, thereby exacerbating the issue of using a system that cannot accommodate the organization’s needs.
When jurisdictions receive state reports, they recognize the data’s complexity. Jurisdictions must collect, clean, evaluate, and apply data strategically. This requires teams of professionals to work toward the same goal and share outcomes with external sources. For this to happen, the system must be user-friendly, leadership must be open to discussing how trends emerge, and the information must be verified as accurate through feedback and outcomes. Local areas have an idea of their outcomes from their experience but may not fully understand the magnitude of their community issues until the data is matched with their experience.
Statewide systems generally do not isolate community needs at the micro level. The information sought from the state includes standard demographics, offenses, dispositions, and post-adjudication completion data. Each state must trust that case management follows best practices because it lacks the personnel to oversee these areas. This leads jurisdictions to seek more refined products to meet their specific needs. However, this investment in their community can produce rapid results and inform better outcomes for those who need them immediately.
Allocating resources to another system is difficult. It’s frustrating to have to purchase something that should be provided. However, once the decision is made to invest in a user- friendly system, it raises the question, “Why do we need to input in two systems now? and that seems to defeat the purpose. If one system isn’t being used, then two systems will be even harder to convince personnel that it is a better option for the organization. However, it depends on how systems are implemented and managed, especially as they relate to our essential duties if systems cannot talk.
Integration may be an option, but for most it is not because of the labor hours involved with making two systems talk and moving a large amount of information from one system to the other. If data is valued as a means of improving the agency’s awareness of immediate outcomes, then the dual-entry methods must be explored. This is not a preferred method because organizations feel it distracts them from the population they serve by requiring unnecessary data entry. However, once implemented, dual-entry can allow jurisdictions to use tailored systems to produce real-time outcomes and apply them immediately to serve their population more efficiently.
The concept of dual entry is simple and less taxing than one might expect. To make it feasible, we must identify and enter the data the state needs, then move to the tailored system for your reports and details. If jurisdictions enter the information within a reasonable time frame in their state system, they can use their preferred system to monitor and disseminate outcomes instantly. This eliminates the need to request data from the state and interpret reports, creates opportunities to build data visualizations, and immediately validates existing data across systems.
That said, juvenile justice data collection is relative. Juvenile justice professionals already perform multiple tasks by duplicating information across spreadsheets, or (if a strong data culture does not exist within our organization) we settle into complacency and fail to collect vital information to better serve our population. We must decide, because people depend on local justice systems to improve their communities. Our options boil down to continuing on an aimless data path and overlooking the importance of our data. Attempt to integrate our information into mass systems and spend money to save minimal time on data entry? Or will we develop organizational strategies and use a tailored system to export our information into usable data while creating new strategies to make it less of a task and more of a tool?
How RiteTrack Can Help
If your organization is looking for ways to improve juvenile justice data collection, RiteTrack can help bring case information, reporting, and day-to-day workflows into one place. Because RiteTrack can be configured around your organization’s processes, staff can capture the information they need while giving leadership better access to the data they use to understand trends, monitor outcomes, and support decision-making.
