Overview
The Arnold Foundation has awarded Multnomah County a grant to develop, implement and host a new statewide performance measurement platform that will provide real-time data to Parole and Probation Officers (PPOs) about their clients using Tableau Server dashboards. The dashboards created for each county will provide PPOs with data in user-friendly formats that allow them to see a client’s history, identify emerging trends on their caseload, and monitor fidelity to evidence-based practices.
Ultimately, having this data available and using it when working with clients can accelerate the Oregon Community Corrections System’s ability to evaluate and implement change (Objective 1), support strategic reductions in violations and revocations (Objective 2), monitor the completion and accuracy of risk assessment tools and dosage related to office visits and services from treatment providers (Objective 3), and identify racial and ethnic disparities at decision points associated with sanctioning, drug testing, and revocation (Objective 4).
National Impact on the Field of Probation/Parole
Evidence-based practices in community supervision are constantly changing and growing. This project will create dashboards that signal new goals and provide a visual guidance system for achieving them. For example, the launch of dashboards that incorporate the Relative Rate Index will offer concrete methods for tracking and monitoring racial and ethnic disparities. Dissemination of this work through the toolkit that will be developed, as well as presentations of the dashboard project at national conferences, will help proliferate these resources and encourage further adoption around the nation.
Project Goals
The goal of this proposed project is to make interactive data dashboards available to all 36 counties in Oregon Community Corrections, potentially impacting the practice of 500 probation and parole officers and the 32,000 felons they supervise. For background, a baseline set of these dashboards has been developed and successfully piloted in two Oregon counties. These track the fundamentals of supervision such as workload, client risk levels, and traditional recidivism measures. This project will make these available statewide, advancing the ability of policymakers to set performance benchmarks in community supervision with supporting systems to track progress. As part of this project, a statewide implementation team of community corrections directors will be established to routinely review the dashboards and innovate new methods of using these dashboards to coach officers and communicate policy goals.
Additionally, this project will establish four dashboards promoting new ways of conceptualizing and expanding core correctional practices. The first dashboard will measure revocation rates and enable managers and officers to track revocations and the factors that are driving them. The second dashboard will examine dosage and the impact on special sub-populations across the state. The third dashboard will identify racial and ethnic disparities at different decision points in the supervision of a case. Finally, a fourth, strengths-based dashboard will be created to help track and highlight success on supervision rather than failure rates. Taken together, these new dashboards will drive community supervision policy conversations into new directions and promote continuous quality improvement in these areas.
Deliverables resulting from the project include a statewide performance management system of dashboards, a practitioner toolkit for implementing data dashboards in the field, and a workshop at a national conference.
