Project Brief

Responding to ever-increasing costs of Corrections without assurance of the effectiveness of prison time, in 2016 the Alaska Legislature passed a criminal justice reform bill.  The bill’s intent was to reduce the number of people in prison and reduce correctional costs without compromising public safety. The initial implementation involved an aggressive timeline in order to satisfy the Legislature’s requirements which was met.  There have been significant modifications to the crime bills by the Legislature in 2019 but the changes implemented earlier are still being utilized and/or can be modified to satisfy the new requirements.

The contract was issued in September 2016, with a first deadline, to support legislative changes by January 1, 2017. Wostmann partnered with RKV Technologies  https://rkvtechnologies.com/ in Missouri for their specialty expertise with Correction Systems and the underlying framework. Our team worked closely with power users of the systems at the Department of Corrections and delved deeply into the crime reform and existing systems to identify and make the changes needed to meet this critical deadline. In addition to business analysis, our team managed the overall project, designed the changes in conjunction with users, programmed the changes, and conducted and coordinated system and user testing. In many cases, by working closely with the power users, Wostmann was able to identify savings by recognizing workflow changes that could simplify the technical change requirements. 

Wostmann was subsequently awarded the second phase of the project, supporting a new PreTrial Division with business analysis, project management, and software engineering.  The PreTrial Division monitors what is known as “pretrial” inmates who may be out of jail before the court date. The PreTrial Division is actively monitoring thousands of pretrial defendants promoting public safety and court appearances in Alaska.

Deliverables:  Modified the existing systems and business practices to support the required legislative changes to Correctional systems by January 1, 2017.  Modified the existing system to support the new business practices for the brand-new Division of Pretrial by January 1. 2018. After the hard deadlines listed above (which had short implementation windows) were meet, we added additional requested functionality and enhancements which allowed Correction officers to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.  We assisted DOC in reporting to the legislature on Probation, Parole, and Pretrial. Additionally, we left the Corrections systems with improvements in performance and data quality.