Washington County Juvenile Detention Center Discusses Benefits of RiteTrack
The Washington County Juvenile Detention Center, probation office and juvenile court work directly with youth who have been charged or sentenced for violating the law in Washington and Madison counties in Arkansas.
Essential information about offenders and services are often difficult to track on paper or with database software, but in order to distribute services to its facilities and provide rehabilitative programming for its residents, that data needs to be accurate and easily accessible.
The Washington County JDC and probation office found that its old database system and many other industry solutions provided the ability to combine and catalogue information from various paper sources and offered some reporting capabilities. However, the information in the database itself could not be shared between the JDC, the court and the probation office within the juvenile detention system. Meanwhile, the court and probation offices were operating without any software information management system and tracked everything on paper. The old database system also was not effective for repeat offenders because it created a duplicate client record for each repeated offense.
When Washington County began looking for a better software solution, it discovered RiteTrack. This solution provided the centralized database with a key benefit: the capability to share client information between offices without sharing sensitive case information. With RiteTrack the JDC, probation office (including prosecutors and public defenders), and court can all enter a new offender into RiteTrack and the other offices can then access the record of that offender.RiteTrack’s security parameters restrict case data viewing, but allow for client information sharing between departments. Therefore, all updates to the offender’s record made by an office are subsequently updated across all the departments.
Specific functionality of RiteTrack which is used by the probation and court side includes management of:
- Court dockets
- Family In Need of Services (FINS)
- Dependent and neglect
- Meetings and hearings
- Criminal cases
- Private cases
- Interstate compact
- Check-in
- Intake and background
- Room assignment
- Social worker recommendations
- Observations
Now with consistent information for each offender throughout the system, all the offices are experiencing better information. This has increased productivity within each office and case processing has become more efficient as well.
The Washington County JDC is a multi-bed holding facility for both clients who have been sentenced and those waiting to be sentenced, but it also provides fee-based holding services for surrounding Arkansas counties.
Juvenile systems across the country can benefit from a RiteTrack solution. This offering is configured to meet any office or department’s specific information management needs. With better information management, juvenile facilities can offer more efficient services to their clients and can increase record reliability across departments and offices. Handel Information Technologies, the maker of RiteTrack, has 15 years of experience in providing software solutions to the juvenile justice field.
