Legal Minded: Building A Better Way To Book PrisonersLegal Minded: Building A Better Way To Book Prisoners

The Justice Department is cleaning up its process for moving prisoners through the system. In doing so, the department shows how identifying a commonly used process and building an IT architecture around it can help government offer better service.

In July 2000, the department began deploying the Joint Automated Booking System (Jabs) to manage prisoner booking by its five law-enforcement groups -- the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

In the past, a suspect might be fingerprinted by the DEA on arrest, again by U.S. marshals who house detainees during trial, and then by the Bureau of Prisons if convicted. Each agency would mail prints to the FBI, which checks them against its database to see if a suspect matches anyone on file.

It was inefficient and ineffective, taking as long as two months on a routine case to get results from the FBI, says Justice Department CIO Van Hitch. So the department brought senior managers, operational supervisors, and IT personnel together to lay out the booking processes, technologies, and data definitions needed to create Jabs. Now, using an electronic finger scan instead of ink and paper, fingerprints are digitized and transmitted to the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The system usually responds within two hours.

Jabs does more than fingerprints. It includes 75 data elements such as digital mug shots and crime descriptions. The Justice Department developed it in Visual Basic; the system runs on Windows NT, and users access it with Windows 2000 and XP clients via a Web browser. Jabs transfers files in

E-mail attachments using Microsoft Exchange and stores data on Hewlett-Packard Unix servers running an Oracle database. Mapping the IT architecture was a critical step, says Brian McGrath, assistant director of systems engineering at the Justice Department. Mapping identified "touch points" -- points that can be linked to other agencies that might, for instance, use Lotus Notes E-mail or a Sybase Inc. database.

That will let agencies outside the Justice Department adopt Jabs rather than build their own systems -- a key element of the Bush administration's efforts to avoid similar yet often incompatible "stovepipe" systems. The Transportation Security Administration and the Secret Service -- two agencies that, along with parts of the INS, might be part of the Department of Homeland Security -- may link to Jabs, McGrath says.

The business processes around which the department built Jabs might even be useful outside of crime fighting. Booking suspects involves steps that are similar to processing applicants for highly sensitive government jobs, Justice CIO Hitch says. Creating a governmentwide architecture can identify those common processes even if they're not obvious at first glance.

Illustration by John Craig

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