Community Corrections Goes Remote

With swift decisions made to help decrease the spread of the Corona-virus, many employees were sent to work from home with little notice.  Even essential community corrections agencies are finding new ways to do the job remotely, including meet with clients, facilitate groups and must continue documenting and accessing crucial client information.

Fun with Data Management…. Really?

How many of you community corrections practitioners dread pulling together month end, quarter end or worse…year end program results? 

So, you are wondering why I would include “fun” in the same sentence as data management.  What’s more surprising is it’s me who is having fun with data management.  I am not a big data person.  Research, spreadsheets, data analysis, not my cup of tea. Include me in on a problem solving, “what works” or implementation discussion and I’ll let someone else do all the research. 

However, you’d be surprised how much better data can be when you don’t have to do any data entry to view basic and complex data analysis for your community corrections program operations.  

Check out an example of just one way we make data fun in our newest data management video “Fun with Data Management - Monitor History”.

Community Corrections Manager is a Hard Job

You are responsible for the things you do, don’t do and should do. You are also responsible for the results and decisions of your team. You have to answer to a variety of stakeholders. After all the meetings are done and requests for information are made, it is hard to find time to connect with your staff or focus on results. If you had a clone of yourself to sit in on all those meetings, you could save a lot of time. I can’t offer you that, but I can show you the next best thing out there.

CorrectTech community corrections software offers managers all the information they need at their fingertips. Among the many benefits for the manager, every part of the client file is accessible and the results are all stored in our data management system.

Check out our newest animated video “Manage People, Not Data” for some specific highlights.
This is part 2 in a 3 part series on our powerful data management system – make sure you watch them all!

Having the Right Ingredients

Baking soda or baking powder? Make sure you check your recipe card before you go dumping in the wrong one. My husband was so kind to make me his first batch of chocolate chip cookies one evening… while I was pregnant and it was urgent that I had some. Let’s just say, he used the wrong one and even though they didn’t taste quite right, I still ate several. What does this have to do with community based corrections you ask?

It’s also important to have all of your key ingredients when completing a case plan with your client. Almost universally in the community based corrections world, there is a risk assessment used to help case managers assess the top criminogenic (crime creating) needs. Setting goals in your case plan to address these high-risk areas increases the chance of reducing this risk. Criminogenic needs and goals are usually required ingredients in a case plan.

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A Shift in Thinking in Community Corrections

I turned 54 when I started writing this post.  So... I’m “old” (at least that is what my four kids tell me).  Another birthday simply means I have personally experienced many shifts in business and information technology in the past half century including but not limited to the following: 

• Mainframes taking whole floors of buildings to networked devices that practically disappear into our surroundings

• Transaction systems in isolated silos to enterprise database systems that allow rapid integration and collaboration

• Large scale custom software projects to highly configurable "off the shelf" software products 

• Simple single function web sites to comprehensive Enterprise web portals

• Cloud technologies such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 

So what does my technology and software experience have to do with today’s community corrections business?