California Stays with HP for Offender Management

800px-Alcatraz_Island_-_prison_cells

California has awarded a $116 million contract to HP for its Strategic Offender Management System (SOMS). The system digitizes Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records and also supports an automated transaction processing system.

HP says that digitizing records can somehow make prisons safer for corrections officers and inmates.  California’s SOMS is one of the largest electronic corrections systems in the United States.

Under the five-year contract, HP will continue to provide a full suite of IT services for SOMS.  In addition to the management and hosting of SOMS, HP will also provide CDCR with disaster recovery and backup support of IT-enabled business processes to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster.

SOMS streamlines business processes by consolidating legacy databases and converting inmate records to digital files. With the HP implementation, CDCR is able to coordinate offender information, case management plans, and other inmate data in a single system for the first time and standardize state prison population management practices across California.

“For the number of inmates we house and process, a paper-based system was a logistical nightmare,” said Russ Nichols, SOMS Project Director, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

California maintains 34 facilities under its corrections system. HP was tasked with digitizing offender tracking in 2009 and bringing the system online. The system now manages online dossiers for each individual, which monitor things like changes to sentencing if say an offender takes anger management classes, or conversely, has an event that would cause corrections to lengthen a sentence. The initial $400 million project was mostly completed in 2011.

The system now supports over 60,000 prisoners, visitors and corrections officials. California says the state has been able to realize a savings of approximately $15 million per year since implementation.