Analytics

CSOSA tasked Delta Decisions to perform analysis and make recommendations for identifying promising intervention pathways for high risk offenders, assessing the effectiveness and potential outcomes of new sanctions guidelines, and examining the use and effectiveness of incentives among offenders.

PROJECT SUMMARY

Delta Decisions examined the CSOSA case management system in order to assess data integrity and create a cohorts of offenders for analysis. We applied advanced statistical modeling with SAS and other tools to our offender cohorts. This included merging data sets from CSOSA’s SAS-based data warehouse, multivariate statistical analyses, trend analysis, similarity scoring, and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). We approached the project in three phases:

1. Analyzed High Risk Offender Pathways. We identified a set of promising intervention pathways to provide high risk offenders with the best opportunity to successfully discharge from supervision. Our key objective was to develop a set of robust statistical models to demonstrate the set of behavioral health and supervision intervention strategies that provide the best opportunity for high risk offenders to successfully reintegrate into society.

2. Assessed the Usage of Incentives. We evaluated the use and benefit of incentives by talking to supervision officers in focus groups. We evaluated the current use of incentives, the benefits, and the limitations.

3. Recommended New Sanctions Guidelines: We examined a cohort of offenders using quantitative analysis and conducted focus groups with supervision officers. Our data analysis allowed us to identify current trends in sanctioning practices and compare current sanctioning practices to a newly proposed sanctioning guidelines. Our focus groups allowed us to obtain information on real-world sanctioning approaches and obstacles directly from the front-line. We combined these approaches to make data-driven recommendations regarding sanctioning effectiveness and implementation.

PROJECT RESULTS

Delta Decisions presents the results from the advanced analytics study in two final reports, which summarize results of our quantitative and qualitative analyses and provide data-driven recommendations. The results are briefed to the CSOSAExecutive Committee.