Before the online check-in tool, defendants pending trial checked-in with pretrial services one to three times per week via telephone to report changes in employment, address or name, and any new contact with police they may have had. The department's front desk administrator fielded almost 200 weekly calls and entered the information into a system for suspects' pretrial supervision officers to access, in addition to her normal workload.
Call volume increased as the county placed more suspects under pretrial supervision to ease jail crowding. Judicial Services planned to hire an extra person to handle the calls and another within the following two years. Those two employees would have cost the county roughly $35,000 each annually, said Rita Pollock, director of IT for Arapahoe County. When the online check-in tool proved it could collect the information that Judicial Services collected over the phone, the department rescinded its request for more staff. The new system automatically e-mails a pretrial supervision officer whenever one of his or her defendants checks in online.
"The goal is to get all of our pretrial supervision offenders, at least 25 percent of them, on this process," Adams said. "We're not there yet. It's just a matter of getting everyone used to it."
County representatives accepted an award for the project at the Center for Digital Government's Best of the Web awards ceremony in Hollywood, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 12.