PROPOSAL FOR PAROLE SELECTION AUTOMATION

Over the past 35 years, the parole board members have had their job increase from 5,000 prisoners to 25,000 prisoners. Obviously their job has become impossible for them to perform effectively. Some type of automation is in order to manage the horde of prisoners and mountains of information that they are entrusted to evaluate.         In this vein, I propose that modern data management techniques be employed to change the information into data that is then statistically analyzed to indicate the best prospects for parole. Consider the following scenario:

An offender is caught. Police record his tattoos. While in prison or out, the offender temporarily thwarts the police by getting bigger tattoos to cover up the recorded tattoos. This cycle repeats itself every time the police record the offender's tattoos.

Tattoos tend to get larger as a function of the offender's commitment to resist change, defy prison programs and return to a life of crime. Such behavior allows us to create indices of the individual's total square centimeters of tattoos and subsequent growth to assign a number and quantity to represent his commitment to criminal and immoral activity. These two statistics can provide a partial parole score, saving parole board members time, effort and money. Such numbers can be easily generated through more effective use of the electronic camera system used today at the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center (LARC). Prisoner's bodies would be photographed, a simple software program would calculate the total area of tattoos and the percent of increase from the previous time that he was captured and sentenced, if any. Pattern recognition subprograms would automatically detect drug icons, swastikas, gang affiliations and thus their underlying philosophies and cultural affectations, to provide ethnic, egocentric and motivational indices for each individual. These various data points would then be automatically added to his electronic profile.

An offender's electronic profile would consist of an aggregate of many offender attributes and their change over his lifetime. He already provides a fairly accurate and modern assessment of his educational accomplishments. This information would also be easy to turn into a function of how much of an offender's useful knowledge and skill base has increased over time. Knowing.this quantity and how much it has increased provides a mathematical representation of his commitment to learning salable skills and using them in the marketplace.

Another index would be the number of times the offender has had to have prison personnel act to help him flee his prison debts, such as those for drug abuse, gambling, cell theft, etc. The function of prison separation orders would be factored in as well. When an offender exhibits black eyes, sexual perversion or other immoral activity, these would be summed to indicate another score in the multifunction aggregate.

Many other numerically weighted functions can be made of other relevant offender attributes, many of which are already collected and underutilized, such as age, family connections and support, children/responsibilities, work history, health of lifestyle, religious affiliation/ church attendance, income/earnings, personality and ethics assessments, geographical location, number of failed paroles/probations or other assessments, and many more. The more functions put in the indices, the more rapid and accurate the parole aggregate score.

Such a tool would be easy to devise and not difficult or overly costly to implement. Such a software system, if devised by a coalition of Oklahoma offenders such as myself, could be owned by the State and licensed at a profit to other states, with a continuing service upgrade contract that would cost virtually nothing, yet provide quarterly profits, perhaps in perpetuity, with the right management.

The primary parts of this system already exist in the form of a parts list and flow charts.     It is a simple exercise in computer programming. Building it would take minimal effort and time. Operation and debugging would be occurring long before any competing system could arise. Independent entrepreneurship in this area is nonexistent because no one realizes there is a need for such a system except the captives and the persons who work in this area. Market share would be 100% for a very long time if startup begins now.

I hope you can see the utility of this and quickly choose to become the primary beneficiary.

Sincerely,

James Bauhaus