Department of Justice, Office of the Federal Detention Trustee

Overview

The Department of Justice Office of the Federal Detention Trustee was established and activated in September 2001 by directive of Congress in response to growing concerns regarding federal detention. It is the mission of the Federal Detention Trustee to provide for the safe, secure, and humane confinement of persons in federal custody awaiting trial or immigration proceedings.

Challenge

In compliance with the President’s Management Agenda which mandates, among other things, that Government agencies work together as a team across traditional boundaries to better serve the American people, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee (OFDT) utilizes technology to create more cost-effective and efficient ways to serve citizens.

With an average daily population in excess of 55,000 detainees across 94 federal judicial districts and an annual federal detention budget exceeding one billion dollars, the goal of improving time and cost savings is paramount. To that end, OFDT set about automating the administrative prisoner designation process that involves the U.S. Federal Courts, the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to help reduce detention costs.

The process of designating a convicted felon to a BOP facility requires information contained in numerous documents and controlled by several agencies and each step of the process entailed moving paperwork between these multiple agencies and geographic locations using fax, postal mail and Fedex. The manual nature of this process led to lost paperwork due to mishandling, slow processing times, and limited audit trail capability with no way of effectively tracking status information. As a result, detainees were subject to extended stays in local prisons and the Federal government was subject to high fees – all as a result of the manual, paper-intense process.

OFDT explored Business Process Management (BPM) technology with the objective of developing a system that would streamline all of the procedures involved in this critical designation process. The agency needed a BPM vendor that met the criteria necessary to support a mission-critical application – including the ability to provide a secure system that would protect sensitive prisoner information, a web browser-based solution that enabled easy access to all employees regardless of agency or location, a cost effective solution, and most importantly it had to provide the capability for the agency to track, report on, and measure ongoing performance metrics.

Solution

After researching a short list of BPM vendors, OFDT selected Metastorm BPM® – a proven solution that met all of its criteria and had demonstrated its proven competency through previous successes in the Federal government sector. Metastorm BPM provides OFDT with a secure, web-based enterprise solution that became the foundation of its automated system known within the agency as eDesignate.

The process of designating a convicted felon to a BOP facility requires information contained in numerous documents and controlled by several agencies, including the District Court, Probation Office, U.S. Marshals Service, and the BOP. Using Web services through Metastorm, the eDesignate system collects all of these documents by connecting to District databases and synchronizing with data in Metastorm BPM which helps facilitate the presentation of one complete designation package to BOP at a single point in time – which is a radical departure from past practice. In addition, the eDesignate system establishes metrics, tracks progress, and provides an audit trail for the designation process. The system can pass necessary data back to the respective agencies to allow for more effective scheduling of prisoners’ ground and air transportation to designated facilities. In addition, eDesignate provides feedback mechanisms across agencies for faster case resolution.

Federal agencies are provided easy access to the secure web server by means of user identification and password. As long as an individual has a computer with Internet connectivity and has been assigned as an authorized user, he or she can access the system and process cases.

The eDesignate system represents the first time ever that the detention processes from several agencies are being consolidated and refined, thus saving the government time and money while eliminating overlapping functions and duplication of effort on the part of the participating organizations.

Results

Automating the designation process using Metastorm BPM enables the agency to meet the challenges presented by the rapid rise in federal criminal cases over the past few years. Now all agencies (or OFDT’s customers involved in the designation process) can easily receive and process or check on the status of any prisoners’ detention designation document in real time. Metastorm BPM has helped the OFDT eliminate an antiquated, paper-based process, create the ability to automatically capture relevant detainee data from other agency systems, save time, eliminate errors, and provide better visibility of the process, while serving to create the full information necessary to make prudent decisions.

The eDesignate system has become the method of choice for the U.S. Federal Courts, USMS, and BOP to process designations and initiate the movement of prisoners to their commitment location. Delivering the necessary prisoner documents and data via a secure, electronic means to the BOP in one completed package and enabling all agencies to monitor and provide relevant information when needed has effectively shortened the post-sentence process thereby saving detention costs.

The eDesignate system is currently operational in 82 districts and is projected to be fully implemented in the 94 Judicial Districts by the end of Fiscal Year 2007. Comparing the paper-based designation process average days from sentence to designation per district with the electronic-based eDesignate program average days from sentence to designation for the 82 districts that are operational, the cost avoidance (on a 12 month basis) can be measured as follows:

Assuming similar performance in the remaining districts, the total cost avoidance for all 94 districts would approximately be $38.8 million.

Using Metastorm as the foundation for the eDesignate system, OFDT has successfully developed a streamlined business process that incorporates a more efficient and effective means of submitting, monitoring, communicating, and resolving designation cases between the Courts, the USMS, and the BOP.

For more information, visit the OFDT website at http://www.usdoj.gov/ofdt/technology.htm.