Ageing probation tech failing to keep tabs on prisoners

Crams! It's crumbling

Failure to update the ageing IT system that helps manage offenders in the UK is making it difficult for the probation service to protect the public when prisoners are released into the community.

Currently, around three-quarters of probation staff use a system known as Crams (Case Recording and Management System), first rolled out in 1995, to keep track of offenders. According to the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo) the non-Windows based system, which acts as a central repository for information on offenders, is outdated and awkward to use.

Tim Wilson, chairman of the Napo, said the probation union has had worries over the system since its inception.

"We first registered concerns about Crams when it was conceived in 1993 and we are still using the same antediluvian system," he told silicon.com at the GovNet Modernising Justice Through IT event last week.

As well as questions over its usability, Crams is unable to share information it holds with prisons or the courts.

"How is it possible that we can protect the public when you've got so many variables to do with inadequate communication in IT systems. What we need is information and the information systems that are reliable," Wilson said.

A replacement for Crams, known as Delius, is currently used by about a quarter of probation staff in the UK, mainly in large cities such as London and Manchester. An upgraded version of Delius will form the basis of a single national case management system for the probation service, allowing the service to share information, and is expected to be fully rolled out by 2011.

However, it seems that Delius is also experiencing reliability issues: Napo says that its members in London complain of frequent problems with the Delius system crashing and being unavailable for hours at a time.

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman denied there were significant problems however saying: "London's IT does not operate at a lower level of performance than other comparable probation areas.

"It does, however, need an upgrade which it is scheduled to get in the next two years.

"In the meantime we are upgrading servers, improving the server builds so that they are more supportable and resilient and increasing WAN bandwidth."

Rather than natively interoperate with the National Offender Management Information System (C-Nomis) - the system that will allow prisons to share information on offender case management - Delius will instead use a bridging system, to allow a limited amount of read-only information to be shared between Delius and C-Nomis.

C-Nomis is currently used by three prisons in Yorkshire and is set to be rolled out to all prisons within 12 months. The bridging system is expected to be in place by 2011.

Director general of the National Offender Management Service (Noms), Phil Wheatley, said the bridging system is preferable to a single integrated system.

"The two services only need to share probably a third of the information held by the other. For instance, the probation service does not need to know what prisoners spend their money on or what cell they are in," he said.

C-Nomis is now working well, Wheatley added.

Originally, a version of C-Nomis that would share all information on offender case management between the prisons and probation services had been planned. However, it was effectively scrapped in 2007 after three years of work and £155m had been spent on the project, when projected costs for the system...

...more than doubled to £690m.

According to Wheatley, the original vision for C-Nomis to share all prisoner case management information between prison and probation services did not "make sense" and had been costed at a "ridiculous" price.

"C-Nomis was a good case study of how not to do it," Wheatley said.

"Having a single system does not make a lot of sense, it is unnecessarily complex."

However, Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of Napo, said that the original C-Nomis could have helped in the supervision of recently convicted Dano Sonnex. While on release from prison, Sonnex went on to murder Gabriel Ferez and Laurent Bonomo in June last year, while out in the community on non-parole licence.

"The absence of an integrated IT system hindered communication," Fletcher said in a statement.

"The collapse of the government's C-Nomis system, which would have helped the process, meant staff resorting to legacy systems, the phone and fax, to vainly try and get information to complete assessments."

A report by the National Offender Management Service into the justice system's handling of Sonnex found that on his release from prison in February last year, where he had been serving a term for assault and numerous robberies, Sonnex was rated as a medium risk, which meant he was free to live in unsupervised accommodation.

The report found that at the time of Sonnex's release the prison's computerised OASys system - used by prison and probation staff to produce and record prisoner risk assessments - had deemed him to be high risk but this information was not passed on to the London Probation Area's Delius system because of technical problems.

The report said: "This is a known issue both with offender managers in the Probation Service and offender supervisors in custody who have difficulty transferring assessments which they share because historically the system was built on two different IT platforms."

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said however that there is "no evidence to suggest IT was a factor in this crime".