E Pluribus Unum: Data and Operations Integration in the California Criminal Justice System

INTRODUCTION There is no single criminal justice "system" in California--just hundreds of separate agencies, each with its own culture, organization, and data. Offenders who are brought into "the system" are actually brought into several separate systems as they are arrested by law enforcement, jailed by sheriffs, tried by courts, sentenced to prison, and released into community supervision under probation or parole. Given that each offender will travel through a number of different agencies, integrated criminal justice seeks, at a minimum, to ensure that information about each offender will travel along with him. For example, once one agency learns that an offender needs psychiatric medications or that he has a particular gang affiliation, other agencies who subsequently gain custody of him should not spend time and resources rediscovering the same information. Integration should ideally involve coordination of programming and other interventions as well, so that an offender undergoing, say, drug and alcohol treatment in one part of the system can simply resume his treatment when he is transferred to a different part of the system.