New Ideas

• Conduct a bottom-to-top review of the District Attorney’s office to develop new efficiencies within the office
• Implement a new program – PreventStat – to track the real-time successes and failures of the programs to which the District Attorney’s office refers offenders.
• Implement a paperless system in the office to:
  • Increase efficiency in pre-trial discovery and provide discovery to the defense in a more orderly and rapid manner
  • Increase efficiency of the office staff and assistant district attorneys
  • Increase safety of documents
  • Decrease the time from arrest-to-arraignment
  • Save money on paper

Conducting a Bottom-to-Top Review

Many people in the District Attorney’s office have extensive knowledge in their issue area.  Richard Aborn has experience going into large organizations and tapping into that knowledge to distill and disseminate best practices guidelines.  The first step of modernizing the office is conducting interviews with all staff, and enlisting outside experts to complement internal expertise to identify areas for improvement and efficiency.  

PreventStat: Using Technology to Effectively Measure Crime Prevention Programs

There are very few studies that measure what works best in prevention, and virtually no systematic studies of individual prevention programs in New York City, particularly in the juvenile justice arena.

While New York City collects statistics regarding youths in the justice system, it does so in a disorganized manner. When data is collected, it is sometimes overlapping – there are databases maintained by the Departments of Juvenile Justice, Correction, Law, and Probation as well as the Administration for Children’s Services and the New York Police Department. There is no centralized collection of data that would best inform stakeholders of how well programs work.

Richard Aborn will spearhead the creation of a citywide group within the five DA’s offices to aggregate data and measure what is working and what is not working. Because the District Attorney’s offices work with police, courts, corrections officials, and many social service providers, the offices are uniquely positioned to lead a collaborative effort to improve data collection and analysis.  Aborn will create a new position in the D.A.’s office – Effectiveness Czar – to lead a system-wide study of outcomes and pinpoint best practices.  This new analysis will make the entire justice system more effective while saving money and increasing the return on taxpayers’ investment.

The office will develop a new data system - “PreventStat” - that will draw heavily from the successful and nationally modeled system “CompStat,” the organizational management tool developed by the New York Police Department in 1994 under the direction and supervision of then-Commissioner Bill Bratton.

PreventStat will address the underlying reason nobody is performing an on-going, real-time study of the effectiveness of specific treatment programs, both for specific individuals and groups of individuals:  the District Attorney’s offices will be able to access both the immediate and long-term data that can be used to measure short-term and long-term outcomes.

PreventStat falls under the well-accepted role of a prosecutor’s office to monitor performance of defendants under indictment or charge to ensure they comply with the mandates imposed on them. Traditionally this monitoring role has been limited to corporations mandated to institute reforms as an alternative to prosecution in criminal court or to mitigate punishment through the option of corrective programs.  However, combining this role with a commitment to expanding the use of treatment programs for non-violent offenders is necessary.

By tracking individual offenders’ progress in his or her treatment program or intervention, the District Attorney’s office will learn which interventions are most effective for specific types of offenders and will allow prosecutors to recommend alternative sentencing schemes that have proven to be effective and appropriate for an offender’s specific offense.

Over time, the office will also be able to measure the long-term impact of a given program’s effectiveness by monitoring whether specific treatment programs were effective at reducing  recidivism. 

Compstat is an effective law enforcement tool because it provides a police department with the ability to improve performance by doing a number of things: 

• It permits the constant monitoring of crime data.
• It permits allocation of police resources to those areas most in need of a police response and to measure the on going need for those resources.
• It allows police to more quickly detect crime patterns.

 
Similarly, PreventStat will: 

• Permit the constant monitoring of data about individual offender’s progress
• Permit the allocation of taxpayer dollars to those programs that are most likely to be effective
• Allow District Attorney’s offices to determine which treatment programs are likely to work for which offenders

The Transition to a Paperless Office

The District Attorney’s office uses extraordinary amounts of paper.  This paper usage wastes time and money.  Going to a paperless system would:

• Increase efficiency in pre-trial discovery. The prosecution of white-collar crimes requires the examination and exchange of thousands of documents. Transporting these documents alone is cumbersome, but the review process is extremely time consuming when done manually.  The transition to electronic discovery, the use of analytics and the conversion to a paperless office will make the review of these documents more efficient as they can be: reviewed by multiple people simultaneously, reviewed remotely, and easily transported. These tools also allow the data to be analyzed quickly and accurately.  A paperless office will also make it easier to share discovery documents with defense attorneys.
• Increase efficiency of the support staff and assistant district attorneys. There is an immeasurable amount of time spent creating files, retrieving said file for a case, physically adding to a file, and transporting files to and from storage facility centers. The support staff will have more time to assist the attorneys with more sophisticated tasks as the need to copy, retrieve and store paper documents is reduced. The movement of these documents also detracts from the amount of time the attorneys in the office can spend reviewing the documents and interviewing witnesses, preparing for trial, etc.
• Increase security of documents. A paperless system decreases the risk of human error in the transportation and filing of documents.  A paperless system will require a clerk to manually scan the documents, but the system will place an automatic time and date stamp on the document that cannot be changed. Documents will not be able to be altered as they are scanned into the system and document software will protect the integrity of the documents. The database will be accessible to selective lists of prosecutors, defense attorneys, parole and probation officers – and only those people will be able to view the case files. The system will also have off-site backups, so that documents cannot be permanently lost or destroyed.
• Decreasing the arrest-to-arraignment time. In a 1991 decision, the State Court of Appeals of New York ruled that anyone arrested in New York who was not arraigned before a judge within 24 hours became eligible for release.[ii]  Despite this, the New York Civil Liberties Union has reported that between October 2004 and October 2005, in Manhattan alone, 28,685 individuals were held for over 24 hours, including 235 individuals held in excess of 48 hours, before arraignment, representing 35% of all those arrested.[iii]  A 2005 Center for Court Innovation study found that the average arrest-to-arraignment time in the New York City courts was 29.2 hours.[iv]  The majority of those that were held in excess of 24 hours were not even charged with felonies upon arraignment, but with low-level offenses, mainly misdemeanors or violations. 
  
  Moving toward a paperless office is a necessary first step in attempting to remedy this breach of civil liberties. It will minimize the amount of time wasted in the system by document transportation, allow multiple agencies to view the documents involved in the arraignment process simultaneously and allow more open communication among the prosecution, the NYPD and the defense.
  
  Reducing arrest-to-arraignment time will also save money, decreasing the number of people held in jail at any one time.  A paperless system will also allow the DA’s office to track the progress of every person in the system in real-time, which will not only assist in processing individuals, but will make the District Attorney and the Effectiveness Czar aware of how the office is performing at expediently arraigning arrestees.
  
• Save money on paper.  Printing multiple copies of documents is costly and harmful to the environment. The DA’s office in Houston County, Georgia saved $15,000 in paper costs from April 1, 2009 to January 28, 2009 with the implementation of a paperless office.[v]

Studies by RTI International, the Justice Policy Institute and many other research bodies have shown that effective treatment of drug dependency and mental health issues leads to lower recidivism rates and that the costs to taxpayers of putting an offender through treatment are far lower than incarcerating them.

The RTI International report is titled “The Impact of Residential and Nonresidential Drug Treatment on Recidivism Among Drug-Involved Probationers.” It found non-residential treatment to be the most effective in lowering recidivism rates.

The JPI report, published in 2004, is titled “Treatment or Incarceration? National and State Findings on the Efficiency and Cost Savings of Drug Treatment versus Imprisonment.” In 2004, JPI estimated the average cost, nationally, for treating an addict was $4,000 per year, compared to $20,000 for incarceration. In New York State, even the cost of one-year of residential treatment (the most expensive type of treatment) is far less costly than one year in prison ($21,000 vs. $44,000.  [Drop the Rock Fact Sheet (http://droptherock.ipower.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/dtr-fact-sheet-2009.pdf)]