OJBC promotes a more effective and efficient justice system through improved sharing of information and automation of business processes. The Consortium seeks to accomplish this by lowering the barriers to entry, and by creating a way for jurisdictions to reuse what others have done at very low cost. The OJBC also wants to ensure that further usage and expansion of the OJB software is also shared back with the community, so that the entire nation can benefit from new capabilities. Open source licensing helps to accomplish all of these aims (see below).
The OJBC also seeks to accelerate justice information sharing by enabling government agencies—and industry partners—to leverage a common platform for building information exchanges. The Consortium believes that the nation will be better off investing resources in building exchanges rather than re-inventing and re-building core infrastructure components that could easily be shared.
OJBC’s approach and philosophy emphasizes collaboration, sharing of information exchanges, reuse of capabilities, and industry standards. Read to learn more, and to find out how Consortium members have successfully implemented exchanges in their states.
The core Open Justice Broker functionality is licensed as open source, which means that all licensees—
Licensees do not have to become members of the OJB Consortium to access the OJB source code—but membership conveys additional valuable benefits. Learn more
The OJBC approach embraces a collaborative approach to information sharing:
A core OJBC philosophy is to develop solutions that incorporate industry and justice standards, which enable linkage of disparate justice systems—from law enforcement records systems, to prosecution and court case management systems, to corrections information systems, and beyond. The OJBC:
All OJB components implement GRA-conformant service specifications. Each service leverages the NIEM as its information model. Where GRA reference service specifications exist, the OJB has leveraged them to the extent practicable. OJB also secures its federated query components with an approach that conforms to the GFIPM user-to-system and system-to-system profiles.
Through the OJB platform, Hawaii Integrated Justice Information Sharing (HIJIS) program offers an automatic Subscription/Notification service that provides probation/parole officers in the state with immediate electronic notifications when their clients are arrested. In the past, officers would wait to receive daily arrest reports, which they needed to review and subdivide by multiple supervision levels—a process which delayed notification of a client’s arrest and made it more difficult to keep the community safer from repeat offenders. Now, with real-time arrest notifications, probation/parole officers are able to use this information to take quicker and more decisive action, which increases public safety.
Practitioners in the field report offered their feedback to HIJIS:
The State of Maine used the OJB platform to implement automated subscription/notification services for probation and parole officers. The service allows probation and parole officers to automatically subscribe to receive notifications when their probationers and parolees are arrested. Without such a capability, these officers do not have a reliable way to learn if their probationers and parolees are reoffending while on supervised release.
Practitioners in the field report finding a lot of value in this new capability, and offered their feedback to the Maine State Police:
Vermont also used the OJB platform to implement automated subscription/notification services for probation and parole officers. The service allows these officers to automatically subscribe to receive notifications any time their probationer or parolee is involved in an incident—whether as a suspect, witness, victim, etc. This capability provides these officers with quick intelligence regarding the current activity of their probationers and parolees while on supervised release.
According to the Vermont Department of Corrections, users of the email Incident Notification system supervise the following types of offenders:
The most common role the probationer or parolee plays in the incident notification? Most often as offender (51%) or person of interest (33%).
Nearly 80% of Incident Notification System users say it has been of benefit to the supervision of their caseloads. Another 15% were undecided (generally supervisors or district managers who do not carry a caseload). Users of the Incident Notification System were asked to explain how it has benefited their work. They responded as follows:
Practitioners in the field report offered their feedback as follows: