Federal Courts Opens Decision Support System

The October 2008 edition of the US Federal Courts - The Third Branch - newsletter contains an article titled: DSS Opens Data Warehouse.  It notes that " the DSS project consolidates the information from the Probation/Pretrial Services Automated Case Tracking System (PACTS), used by all 94 districts, into the National PACTS Reporting Database." The article notes "Matt Rowland, who heads up DSS development at the AO. “It was a challenge to consolidate and report that data in a way that was useful to decision makers. With DSS, we bring in every single record from PACTS. That means we have millions of additional data elements and with new reporting technologies, we can slice and dice the data very easily." Further the article states:  "(l)ogging into Version I of DSS, users can view dashboards on clinical services, post-conviction supervision, pre-sentence reports, pretrial services, and workload. Dashboard is a term used for the Web-based display of data. Like a car’s dashboard, it shows how the machine is performing. For example, a probation officer may want to see the average Risk Prediction Index (RPI) score for offenders over a period of time, or the average cost of treatment per offender."