Elvis never sang about jailhouse IT, nor has Eminem for that matter, but Larry Bernosky is singing the praises of how technology is helping streamline the criminal justice system in Arizona’s Maricopa County. Population in the county, which encompasses the greater Phoenix area, grew by 50 percent during the 1990s.

That growth hasn’t slowed down at all?Maricopa is the nation’s second fastest-growing county and home to 3.2 million people. As the population has grown, however, so too have the accompanying undesirable elements. The number of arrests and criminal case filings has increased dramatically. The county’s eight jails, built to accommodate 5,600 inmates, now house more than 8,000. To help alleviate overcrowding, Maricopa residents passed Proposition 400?the so-called jail tax?in November 1998. Proposition 400 instituted a temporary seven-year sales tax to raise $900 million to build and operate new jail facilities.

County officials soon realized they needed more than just new jails. The county’s criminal justice information systems were in need of a major overhaul. In 1997, Maricopa hired Chinn Planning, a division of RNL Design, an architectural consultancy with offices in Phoenix, to evaluate its criminal justice system in light of its soaring population. The report not only confirmed the need for more jails but also concluded that the county needed to do a better job of automating and integrating its information systems. There were myriad problems?redundant data collection, error-prone manual data entry, ad-hoc interfaces, replicated functions, lack of a unique common case identifier and lots of paper. Data was gathered primarily by telephone, fax and onsite visits. None of that data was shared electronically. The result was unreliable and unavailable information.

To tackle those problems, the county earmarked $25 million from Proposition 400 to create a cross-departmental group, the Integrated Criminal Justice Information System (ICJIS) agency. Its primary mission was daunting?create a convergent architecture to improve data sharing among the county’s five major criminal justice agencies. Following the passage of Proposition 400, those five groups?the sheriff’s office, county attorney, superior court, clerk of the court and indigent representation agencies?established an executive committee that comprises the heads of each of the five groups to determine policy and guide ICJIS’s integration efforts. The executive committee established a business team of operational leaders from each group to deal with budgets, policies and other activities to fulfill ICJIS’s mission.

ICJIS hired a director, John Doktor, in February 2000. In January 2001, Bernosky joined the agency as manager of data integration and started to assemble his IT staff. He is responsible for making the convergent architecture a reality.