Victim Restitution Information Processing System

About the Program

Category: Criminal Justice and Public Safety (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

When a court punishes someone for a crime against a county citizen or business, an essential part of the court’s order is to pay the victim for any financial loss or damages. The Community Corrections Program (CCP) is the county agency required to implement these court orders and process the restitution payments for victims. In order to meet court mandates and victim customer service expectations, the ability to track offender compliance and facilitate payments to the victims is paramount. Having started the CCP 12 years ago with only a few cases and no additional staffing, the workload has grown 1,000 percent, to managing 1,500 active cases and processing an average 200 payments a month. Various restitution data had to be kept in three separate systems, causing gaps and inefficiencies, further overwhelming staff resources. The result was backlogs of three months in filing violations with the court, and delays of up to five weeks or more in processing payments for victims. At no cost to the probation agency or the county, an inter-agency team of Information technology project staff and Community corrections staff worked over nine months to develop a unique, fully integrated case management and payment tracking system for all critical information. The resulting success was a user-friendly, web-based Victim Restitution Information processing System (RIPS), which improved timelines of payments by 500 percent, and court violations to within 30 days.