-- as of April 17, 2008:  Although the risk assessment bill died in the 2007 session, the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission is exploring a new approach to integrating risk assessment into guidelines.  The Oregon Judicial Department Technology modernization project received initial legislative funding authorization in spite of a downturn in the economy.  On Feb. 14, 2008, we made the case for the urgency of modernization largely by stressing the sentencing support application and related support for sentencing, release, probation, juvenile, and family law dispositions.  Clips from the testimony are available at YouTube: Judges explain eCourt Urgency:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoPjMQXQ3Lk; How eCourt improves sentencing:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-a7Wnzmb7A ; Trial Court Administrator explains eCourt Urgency:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clbv5bq7R_Q

-- as of May 19, 2007:  The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, acting pursuant to SB 919 from the 2005 session, adopted rules and promoted modifications to a substantial range of grid blocks in the guidleines within which judges would be required to consider a risk assessment instrument and permitted discretion to impose sentences ranging from probation to prison as appropriate from all the circumstances.  The required legislative approval, packaged in the form of 2007 SB 276-4, appears likely to die due to its fiscal impact and the politics of just deserts.  But the new Director of the CJC, Craig Prins, is enthusiastic about achieving evidence-based practices through the guidelines, the Commission voted 5-1 in favor of this modification, and Rep. Chip Shield's proposal for a criminal justice study may provide a vehicle for more efforts in this direction in the interim (for the 2009 session).
    Efforts to divert the Model Penal Code sentencing revision from enshrining just deserts as the dominant sentencing principle failed at the 2007 American Law Instute annual meeting.  Provisions of the revision draft that remain to be constructed, however, afford some opportunity for ameliorating this unfortunate setback.
     The Oregon Judicial Department Technology Committee, under the direction of our new Chief Justice, Paul De Muniz, is moving ahead with plans for technological modernization, much of which provides an IT infrastructure to support state-wide sentencing support tools.  "Decision Support" including sentencing support is an express component of the target outcome.  A piece of the question is the success of efforts to achieve a department budget and technology budget that is up to these tasks.

-- as of December 18, 2005: The Department of Corrections is circulating a draft of new directions for presentence reports, implementing SB 914 to require presentence reports to analyze what is most likely to work to reduce an offender's future criminal conduct, and set forth the practial availability of any relevant programs in or out of custody.  The Criminal Justice Commission has accepted the mandate under SB 919 to explore whether sentencing guidelines can incorporate means to pursue crime reduction with sentencing, and has directed the formation of the advisory committee contemplated by the bill.  Oregon Chief Justice Wallace Carson, Jr., has agreed to chair that committee.  (Justice Carson has announced his retirement as of the end of 2006, and is stepping down as Chief Justice to facilitate the transition of that role to incoming Chief Justice Paul de Muniz).

-- as of July 11, 2005:   The two proposals from the Governor's Public Safety Review Steering Committee having to do with smart sentencing have passed both houses and have been signed into law by the governor of Oregon.  The bills are SB 914 ["Directs Department of Corrections to require that presentence report provide analysis of disposition most likely to reduce offender's criminal conduct and provide assessment of availability of relevant programs or treatment to offender"] and SB 919 ["Directs Oregon Criminal Justice Commission to study feasibility of incorporating consideration of reduction of criminal behavior and crime rate into sentencing guidelines"].
    The Oregon Judicial Department has received a report from a task force on future technology, along with a technology plan for the future.  State-wide sentencing support tools are a part of that plan. The task force recommended, and the Chief Justice appointed, a technology governance committee to guide the development of court technology in the future with input from stakeholders within and outside the judicial department.  Decision support technology, including that directed at sentencing support, is well represented on that committee, which has begun its monthly meetings.  As of this writing, judicial decision support, including sentencing support, is apparently at the third priority (among over 20) for judicial department technology projects.
    Judges no longer require the use of a SecurID fob to gain access to sentencing support tools.

-- as of December 19, 2004:   Sentencing support tools continue a slow but steady expansion in deployment.  Newer judges have become used to finding reference to these tools in sentencing arguments, and a growing number of attorneys refer to them in preparation for these hearings.  We are hoping soon to drop the SecurID fob requirement for judges to make access to the tools less cumbersome.  Multnomah County PSI writers regularly incorporate sentencing support tools in presentence reports.  Probation officers are now implementing the revised report writing program, reporting on risk assessment, criminogenic factors, stage of change analysis and resources, and are moving into a new role: becoming the "what works" expert for the court in probation violation hearings.  The Governor's "Public Safety Review Steering Committee" concluded its work on adult sentencing issues, and recommended to Oregon's governor, among other things, "that the Chief Justice sponsor[ ] education for the judiciary on the impact on recidivism of length of revocation sentences and sanctions imposed as a result of violations," that the "Criminal Justice Commission shall examine the feasability and means of incorporating consideration of future crime conduct and reducing crime rates into Oregon's felony sentencing guidelines," and that PSI investigations include attention to “Analysis of what is most likely to reduce this offender’s future criminal behavior and why, including the availability of any relevant programs in or out of custody” [expanding state-wide the Multnomah County innovation].

-- as of January 31, 2004:  Although budget cuts have impaired progress, the "what works" movement continues to progress in the corrections community, and Multnomah County criminal judges' efforts to work with the probation department (see May 17, 2003) and to focus pre-sentence investigations on crime reduction (see January 27, 2002), are beginning to bear fruit.  This month, PSI reports have begun to include as a regular module a crime reduction analysis of the offender based on available literature and a synopsis of the most relevant results from the use of our sentencing support tools. We hope and expect to fold this into routine probation officer reports and probation violation hearings. The last session of the Oregon Legislature adopted a requirement that corrections agencies devote at least half of their program budgest to "evidence-based programs," defined as coste effective crime reduction interventions with substantial research support.  2003 Or Laws Ch 669 [SB267].  The Interim Judiciary Committee is conducting hearings on implementation.

-- as of May 17, 2003:  The same budget crisis that helped derail the PDSW has left Multnomah County's data warehouse (DSS-Justice) standing though with loss of at least one FTE, which impairs our ability to grow but allows us to continue.  Presentations to the Local Public Safety Coordinating Council and others have supported efforts to restore cuts to DSS-Justice.  Meanwhile, we are slowly expanding efforts at deployment, most recently by collaboration with the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice.  Through meetings with the director and upper management of DCJ and judges, we hope to introduce "what works" language into the routine of probation violation reports and to enlist probation officers as resources about what works (and advocates for public safety) in probation violation hearings -- both by having POs use the sentencing support tools and by expecting them to bring relevant research and experience to the task.

-- as of June 14, 2002:  The project director of the PDSW has taken a different job in another governmental agency, with the option to return should the PSDW miraculously revive.  Informal discussions among the Department of Corrections, the Oregon Youth Authority, and the Oregon Judicial Department suggest that these agencies will share data as necessary to achieve sentencing support functionality on the state level.
    The judges' requirements issues are nearing resolution, with a distribution to the participating Judicial Conference committees and judges expected in early July.
    At the Multnomah County level, computer access to sentencing support tools has been provided to the major public defender firm, and a computer has been provided at the Multnomah County Courthouse for access by all defense attorneys.  A link to the attorney user manual and other documentation has been provided on the Multnomah County Courts public web page.
 

-- as of April 28, 2002:  Nineteen judges have received training in using Multnomah County's sentencing support tools, as have members of the largest of the indigent defense firms, Multnomah Public Defenders.  Private defense attorneys should be able to access a computer in the courthouse for sentencing support purposes by mid May, and MPD should have in-house access by then as well.  Use of the bar charts generated by the program is slowly infiltrating settlement conferences and plea negotiations.
    At the state level, the requirements phase of developing sentencing support tools state-wide is nearing completion, with a report due to the Technology in the Courts and Criminal Law committee meetings at the Oregon Judicial Conference in early May.
    The Public Safety Data Warehouse is probably dead, with pronouncement in limbo.  Budget shortfalls led to layoffs in all of the participating agencies (State Police, Department of Corrections, Oregon Judicial Department, and Oregon Youth Authority), but most of us suspect that turf and related concerns had some role in the demise of the project -- remarkable given that a lot of federal money is likely to be returned unused.  Informal talks about data sharing without the warehouse are ongoing, and we fully expect to supply sentencing support tools with necessary data from each of the participating agencies.

-- as of January 27, 2002:  DSS-Justice ISD staff have crafted a variety of refinements to code and interface of sentencing support tools at user request. Ten Multnomah County judges have completed training in using the tools, and another six are scheduled for trainings in the first two weeks of February.  The DSS-Justice Security and Policy Committees have approved connecting an existing computer terminal in the courthouse for use by criminal defense attorneys who wish to prepare for sentencing hearings and plea negotiations with these tools. DSS-Justice Coordinator Gail McKeel and her staff are addressing the committees' request that this terminal allow access by OJIN (case) number only.  The district attorneys have received a presentation on sentencing support tools, and have access in their office through at least one terminal.  Sentencing Support tools are used daily in at least one courtroom, with others expected to be on line in coming weeks.
    Multnomah County judges on a criminal rotation have decided to revise the standard order for presentence investigation (PSI) to include a new check box ahead of those on the existing form:

The Court further directs that the Presentence Report include the following:

[ ] Analysis of what is most likely to reduce this offender’s future criminal behavior and why, including the availability of any relevant programs in or out of custody

-- as of November 7, 2001:  Sentencing support tools have been brought to a useable level, and made available to early user judges in Multnomah County.  A link to these tools is now available on the Multnomah Judges internal website, on the "Criminal Bench" page.  An on-line user manual and data rules (that define the standards by which the software calculates criminal record severity for each of the five levels in each of six categories of crime) are available to judges.
    At the state level, sentencing support has been assigned to an active level on the Oregon Judicial Department's Information Technology Division short list of projects.  An analyst has reverse engineered the Multnomah County and has prepared an analysis which has been shared with the Judicial Conference sponsors, the Technology in the Courts and Criminal Law committees.  Members of these committees have today met to review the report and to hear ITD's plan for further development.  We have scheduled joint meetings to begin work on guiding the project, with a two day session in early 2002 to develop requirements. The requirements session is a critical step for defining engineering objectives from which construction of the tools can be planned and measurable deliverables developed. The first phase is likely to be how much can be accomplished within OJIN data (Oregon Judicial Information Network), with future phases expected to integrate other criminal justice agency data and, eventually, Public Safety Data Warehouse data.
    The Public Safety Data Warehouse project of the Department of Oregon State Police has hired technicians to plan and implement a "phase I" of that project.  These technicians have helped to finalize a Project Charter and a Project Overview Document.  The Judicial Department is represented on the PSDW Steering Committee which oversees the project.  As of this date, a Request for Proposals has been finalized for publication to potential vendors of warehouse, extraction, and query tools.

-- as of March 31, 2001:  Although supplemented by additional letters of support (including one from Governor John A. Kitzhaber, M.D.), the SJI Concept Papers were not funded during this round.  However, Multnomah County court technical staff is nearing completion of validation, and is readying rollout of laptops for all judges.  Gail McKeel and her staff have revised sentencing support code to exploit existing data (some calculations required data which has not been routinely collected) and to improve accuracy  in close consultation with the user group chaired by Judge Michael Marcus.  Gail's group has vastly improved linking of records within DSS-Justice, adding significantly to the usefulness of sentencing support tools against data currently available in the warehouse.  The combination should mean that at least several judges will be regularly using sentencing support tools by mid summer, 2001.  At the state level, Chief Justice Wallace Carson, Jr., has directed the Judicial Department's Information Technology Division to begin work on sentencing support for judges state-wide (without awaiting the completion of the State Police Public Safety Data Warehouse).  Justice Carson has appointed Judge Marcus chair of the Technology in the Courts Committee of the Oregon Judicial Department with instructions to work with ITD and a committee of appellate judges concerned with technology products for their use in response to a 2001 legislative budget note (originating with the Advancing E-Government Subcommittee of Ways and Means) requiring that OJD and the Oregon State Police return in March of 2002 for a plan for integrated information management for criminal justice agencies.

-- as of November 22, 2000:  Multnomah County's DSS Policy Committee has yet to evaluate whether to seek a Public Record Law amendment, but is expected to do so in the near future. Gail McKeel has come on board as Nancy Arnot's replacement as head of the technical staff responsible for DSS-Justice; Nancy is still involved, but will focus on a mental health data warehouse project for Multnomah County.  Work is ongoing to finalize an intergovernmental agreement for receipt and integration of LEDS data into the DSS-Justice data warehouse, and the technical work to accomplish the integration itself has begun.  Meanwhile, we have submitted applications for two related grants from the State Justice Institute.  One would obtain $30,000 for a validation process to ensure that the data and calculations of the sentencing support tools accurately correspond with data from underlying sources; this validation is a necessary step for rolling out the tool to judges county-wide.  The other, seeking $150,000, would fund several enhancements to sentencing support: 1) the integration of LEDS data; 2) the ability to compare common clusters of sentencing elements; and 3) the ability to compare dispositions of probation violation hearings for similar offenders.   Both applications (technically, "concept papers" at this stage) have been submitted with letters of support from the Chief Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, the Presiding Judge of Multnomah County Circuit Court, the Mayor of Portland, the County Chair of Multnomah County, the District Attorney of Multnomah County, the Director of the Multnomah County Public Defender, the Chief of Police of the Portland Bureau of Police; the Sheriff of Multnomah County, the Attorney General of Oregon, and the Director of the Oregon Department of Corrections.  More letters of support will follow.

-- as of September 30, 2000:  We've exchanged drafts of a Public Record Law amendment to point public record requests from data warehouses to data suppliers or end users who produce reports based on warehouse contents; we've begun negotiations of an intergovernmental agreement to access LEDS data (with expectations that it may serve as a blueprint for future data sharing agreements by the Public Safety Data Warehouse); sentencing support technology was presented to the Interim Judiciary Committee's "sentencing workshop" at the University School of Law on September 29, 2000; Multnomah County Corrections has received a technical assistance grant from the National Institute of Corrections and the Center for Effective Public Policy designed to use sentencing support technology and the DSS-Justice data warehouse to support better pre-trial release decisions

-- as of June 24, 2000:  The judge "beta users" have been trained, and we have obtained security authorization for participation of a group of defense attorney "beta users," who have also been trained.  Prosecutor training has been delayed only by scheduling difficulties, but is expected shortly.  Most importantly, the sentencing support tool is now available beyond misdemeanor and bench probations; we've added OJIN codes and are beginning to find useful results in a wide range of cases.  Work continues on expanding the participating data sources -- BOEC and DOC are on the way; LEDS continues to focus security and confidentiality issues.  Discussions with the Deputy Attorney General involved are productive and ongoing; they may yield legislation concerning Public Record Act issues.

-- as of March 25, 2000: Six Multnomah County judges have completed an orientation and will soon join Michael Marcus as "beta users" to refine the sentencing support tool, and Multnomah County court ISD staff will create the necessary links to those judge's departments.  The "domestic violence" crime theme module has been added to the tool and is now running.  The technical team is finalizing work to bring BOEC and DOC data into the warehouse.  The focus group has articulated the means by which to expand the usefulness of the tool beyond the relatively small slice of offenders for whom there is "court coordinator" data because they have been assigned bench probation with special conditions.

-- as of February 20, 2000: Since last report, we've demonstrated sentencing support technology to City Council Dan Saltzman, who is responsible for Bureau Of Emergency Communication (BOEC), and for Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers, whose deputies advise state agencies on the security and confidentiality issues that stand between DSS and the agencies' data.  BOEC and Department of Corrections data will soon be available; negotiations for State Police Law Enforcement Data System (LEDS) data continue.   We've also shown the tool to important folks in the Alcohol and Drug Treatment community, and will be approaching the head of the Office of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Programs for access to this data.
    Now that the tool is running against real data in a courtroom for the first time, several Multnomah County judges have agreed to join the project as beta testers.  Judges who participate world wide in an automated mailing list were notified of the first step by way of the "Kitty Hawk" analogy e-mail.

-- as of January 15, 2000:  The Multnomah County Sentencing Support Software Focus Group (Michael Marcus, Nancy Arnot {DSS Coordinator}, Tom Cleary {Deputy DA}, John Connors {a public defender} and Charles Hill {Multnomah County ISD's new addition, technical lead on the project} together viewed an updated version of the software running for the first time against real data in the data warehouse. Not all of the crime theme modules (part of the means by which to select "like" offenders for comparison) function, recalculation is not yet possible, but within a week we expect the software as described on this site to be functional with real data for misdemeanors generating bench probation.  Tom Cleary and Nancy Arnot have worked out most of the rules for adding a "domestic violence" module to the criminal theme function; John Connors and Michael Marcus will review their product before it is included in the software.
    The Joint Interim Judiciary Committee of the Oregon Legislature has announced a "Sentencing Policy Workshop" for January 27, 2000, in Salem.  All of the members and presenters have been provided with a description of Multnomah County's progress and a reminder that this tool will soon assist such discussions.  Members of the Joint Committee have expressed an interest in being informed of our progress, and local public officials have asked for demonstrations.  Multnomah Chair Beverly Stein saw a demonstration of the tool on Friday, January 7.
    Because of the length of the process for bringing LEDS data on-line in the Multnomah County project {this is complicated by the presence in LEDS of data from federal sources, each of which has its own concerns for security and its own process for addressing its concerns}, Multnomah County DSS is moving Multnomah County Adult Community Service data ahead of LEDS in the line for adding data to our warehouse.  Multnomah County Community Corrections head Elyse Clawson is scheduled to view a demonstration of the tool on Monday, January 24.

-- as of December 15, 1999:   Multnomah County has budgeted for permanent support for DSS-Justice, the technology project of which sentencing support is a part; other public participants are expected to contribute some share.  Multnomah County ISD has filled several positions to allow it to assume technical support for the project. We are presently examining text field data for extending the application to scrutiny of misdemeanor sentencing elements, and are looking at CIS data as well. We hope to gain access to LEDS data  (from the Oregon State Police) in the near future.  The Oregon Judicial Department continues to recruit for its technical FTEs for a state-wide data mart of which sentencing support will also be a major part, and the Oregon State Police are similarly involved in recruiting for construction of the Public Safety Data Warehouse.

-- as of November 6, 1999:
    Multnomah County's sentencing support tool has reached a level of completion that justified a demonstration to Oregon judges at a state-wide conference in mid October.  By selecting a case number, the user prompts the software to propose a defendant and a charge for sentencing (count 1), while allowing the user to select the offender and charge without those defaults.  The software then displays the sentencing elements (one bar each) about which there is significant data for all similar offenders who have previously been sentenced for the same type of charge; the bars demonstrate success by percentages who "succeeded" in avoiding new criminal activity by the default recidivism measure.  Tabs allow the user to vary the charge for which past outcomes are compared (from specific statutory subsections to broad categories of crime, with many options between), the profile of offenders who are deemed "like" the one being sentenced (the default defines the profile by age, gender, ethnicity, and criminal history themes), and the outcome measure (the default defines recidivism as a conviction for a similar charge within three years of having been sentenced, but the user can vary the type of criminal behavior, the time period after sentencing, and the event -- arrest or conviction -- that marks a failure).  Delay has been occasioned by transitioning from the Bond Technology team, all contractors, to Multnomah County ISD support, as regular funding is replacing the one-time technology bond and the DSS-Justice project becomes a formal part of the county budget.  The project is now the joint executive responsibility of the County Chair, Bev Stein, and Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schrunk.  Major tasks ahead include adding new data sources to the data warehouse, recruiting a full compliment of technical personnel as county employees, and completing the integration of the sentencing support front end with the warehouse data.  Much of the code is written, the technical team having concluded that custom code is required to deliver the sentencing support tool.
    The Oregon Judicial Department received substantial technical funding from a legislative session that denied judicial salary and retirement improvements, and rejected a report that urged the creation of many new judicial positions in the state.  The OJD ISD is also recruiting for its own warehouse -- probably a data mart to the State Police Public Safety Data Warehouse -- and is committed to providing Oregon judges with sentencing support tools state wide.  We expect to seek additional funding from the state E-Board in early 2000.
    The Oregon State Police held its kick-off event for the construction of the Public Safety Data Warehouse on November 4, 1999.   Representatives from the Governor's office and the Information Resource Management Division of the Department of Administrative Services conveyed determination that this project will finally achieve the integrated information system that has eluded the criminal justice and law enforcement community for so many years -- and acknowledged that sentencing support is a primary deliverable intended for users by the Judicial Department.

-- as of May 4, 1999:
   Multnomah County's sentencing support tools are now in their highest state of completion: the sentencing support piece is able to display dispositions ranked by the selected flavor of recidivism for the selected offender profile and crime of conviction, and the program selects only those dispositions that are sufficiently numerous for those offenders and crimes of conviction to be helpful for comparison.  What remains before the tool will be functional in support of sentencing decisions is substantially greater refinement of offender characteristics and specific rather than generic disposition categories.
    Multnomah County is also working on transition from the Bond Technology funding base to stable funding with county and agency funds, and is also considering assignment of this project to an agency head to act as advocate for the program's ongoing funding and support.
    At the state level, funding remains the primary issue, and the Ways and Means process is expected to last for a month or more before we know if OJD will receive sufficient technology funds from the legislature to build sentencing support for Oregon courts.

-- as of April 10, 1999:
    The Oregon State Police Public Safety Data Warehouse (see the Final Report  ) has received a commitment for federal funding, and the Governor has approved the expenditures for construction of the PSDW as recommended in that Report.  Those of us involved in improving technology within the Oregon Judicial Department have made a presentation to the Public Safety/Regulation Subcommittee of the legislature's Ways and Means Committee in support of OJD's technology budget requests, and the head of our ISD has committed to construction of sentencing support tools, as outlined in this site, with the moneys received.  The budget process could drag through May and into June, 1999.
-- as of March 28, 1999:
    At the Multnomah County Level, the rollout date for the first working version of sentencing support has steadily retreated as the DSS-Justice staff has encountered unforeseen wrinkles of all sorts.  Sentencing support is the last building block of DSS-Justice, as it requires that the foundation be in place: dependable access to at least a sufficient number of databases to supply the information needed for sentencing support, verified "scrubbing" of data to ensure that like values are correctly identified, communications through firewalls, reliable functioning of our OLAP tools (most importantly Viador, fka InfoSpace, at this point), accurate offender identification and record report generation, and accurate "recidivism" reports.  User groups have been giving the developers feedback, and the developers have now finally focused their efforts on producing sentencing support functionality.  I've been working with Jeff Nader to identify the OJIN codes and entries needed to yield program data.  We hope to have a working model in April.
    At the State level, the Oregon State Police is the agency identified by the Governor's Working Group Final Report  as the entity to build and maintain the Public Safety Data Warehouse, an integrated repository of all requisite data from all state and local criminal justice agencies.  That agency is seeking federal funding for the PSDW, and the Final Report acknowledges that the Oregon Judicial Department will use its access to the PSDW for sentencing support purposes as soon as that is feasible.  Meanwhile, OJD is involved in the budget process in the 1999 Oregon Legislature, and Information Technology items are at the top of our priority.  The Chief Justice, Wallace Carson, Jr., and the head of OJD's ISD, Carl Ward, are committed to providing sentencing support as described on this site as soon as that is possible.

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