While new technologies are being widely adopted in the criminal justice sector, there is still a lot of outdated technology in certain parts of the system. In prisons, in particular, technology is wildly out of date.
On the lack of integration between justice departments, Baylee Hills, Senior Research Officer at the Ministry of Justice, said, “Integration is complicated, primarily because everyone is using different, outdated systems that aren’t user-friendly. The effort required to undertake such integration is so massive that few want to tackle the challenge."
“You can’t phase out a legacy system until a new one is entirely operational, which leads to duplicated efforts. Additionally, people feel overburdened with requests to change their working methods or to input information multiple times. “The current systems are somewhat outdated and not very user-friendly, plus they cannot talk to each other properly. Therefore, it requires building new systems instead of linking existing ones, which is difficult.”
The introduction of nationalised minimum standards would be advantageous when it comes to how technology should be used in prisons, argued Annette So, Director, Criminal Justice Alliance at the recent Modernising Criminal Justice Conference.
“It would ensure that the different people who are implementing technologies would have to talk to one another and could learn from each other.”
“The current systems are somewhat outdated and not very user-friendly, plus they cannot talk to each other properly. Therefore, it requires building new systems instead of linking existing ones, which is difficult.” Baylee Hills, Senior Research Officer, Ministry of Justice
This is an excerpt from the Tech-Savvy Collaboration: Key Insights from the GovNet Justice Survey Report. Download the free report below.
