By: Joe Robbins, Product Implementation Specialist
As a practitioner, you understand that classification doesn’t end after the first inmate assignment. Maintaining vigilance to ensure inmates are in the right place with the right group of people is imperative to population and staff safety and operational effectiveness. Most classification systems understand the need, and account for, ways to reclassify and review inmate housing assignments. What they don’t do, however, is make it easy to reclassify and review, ensuring that your staff will do it how and when it needs done. Below are the ways equivant Corrections’ Decision Tree prioritizes inmate reclassification and reviews:
- No Duplicate Entry – Making It Easy and Fast: Your staff has millions of to-dos. If a process is not easy and effective, it may not get done. Because the Decision Tree is housed within our Northpointe Classification Management Suite, all the information about each inmate lives in one place. This means that reclassification and review is prompted by a triggering event or length of time and your staff is served a series of yes or no questions based on the status change. This is not classifying the inmate all over again like many other systems require. The Decision Tree is smarter and integrates inmate data automatically so the reclassification and review process is simpler and easier. With a few yes/no questions, your inmate is reclassified appropriately.
- Reminders to Review: As you are aware, state and local standards and agency policies often require how frequently inmates must be reviewed if there are no status changes. The Decision Tree prompts staff, based on your unique requirements, to review inmate classification, even when the inmate has experienced no status changes. This ensures premium safety in your facility and also keeps you compliant.
- Prompts for Reclassification in Real Time: The Northpointe suite monitors each inmate in real time for behavior issues, detainers or holds placed, if their sentence status changes (if they go from pretrial to being sentenced or from being sentenced but with another warrant served), and if the inmate’s charges change in any significant way. Each of these triggers will prompt staff to review and potentially reclassify right away so that no time is wasted. This mitigates liability and improves facility safety.
- Customized Reclassification and Review Pathways for Enhanced Accuracy and Time Savings: Based on the triggering event, the Decision Tree knows whether to take your staff through a mitigating series of questions for reclassification (if the change with the inmate is nonexistent or has been positive) or an aggravating series of questions (if the change with the inmate has been negative). This saves your staff time during the reclassification and review process!
- Advocacy and Education at Your Disposal: Our practitioners don’t just set you up with your new system and forget about you. In serving agencies and correctional facilities across the country, our practitioners keep up with national changes in the industry, court decisions, and software updates and share this information with you on a regular basis.
It could be argued that constant awareness and dedication to strategic reclassification and review is the single most important factor (after initial classification) to maintaining a safe facility. It is also imperative to mitigating risk of litigation. With a classification solution that places as much emphasis on reclassification and review as it does initial classification, you become a safer facility, all while saving your staff time.
