GREENFIELD — Hancock County prosecutor Brent Eaton is hoping to accumulate additional details on the county’s prison justice program making use of a new laptop method that would be obtainable to the community.

“I’ve been on the lookout for a thing like this for a extended time,” Eaton reported.

The software program is known as Commons and is intended by a nonprofit organization named Actions for Justice focused to the selection of prison justice information. The info, Eaton reported, would assistance his office environment and county govt in normal make superior choices about criminal justice.

Eaton mentioned 1 use for the software would be to support individuals in county government have an understanding of the success charge of the prosecutors’ place of work in striving circumstances, as nicely as other data like how normally defendants are routed into diversion systems.

“I can run 99 trials in a row, and if the paper doesn’t cover it, you almost certainly would not even know. And then I can go and I can reduce a person, and folks are contacting me a bozo due to the fact I lost,” Eaton stated. “…I use that as an case in point, mainly because the impact that you would have about what transpired is based on incomplete data.”

Commons presents monthly data and annual performance actions on the prosecutor’s situations. It can measure how many scenarios every single month are referred to the office, turned down, referred to a diversion software and far more. It also tracks actions like time from offense to sentencing what proportion of nonviolent offenders are sentenced to jail time and the common duration of sentence imposed.

The computer software also characteristics a every month intention tracker that lets every single prosecutor’s workplace established goals for what they’d like to obtain for case in point, referring a selected proportion of defendants to diversion courses. Then Commons can exhibit whether they are producing progress or falling brief.

Facts on Commons would be obtainable on a community dashboard, so anybody could appear at and filter the info. If a prosecutor’s business takes advantage of the program, it’s essential to generate a community advisory board that will fulfill with the prosecutor and with the nonprofit Steps for Justice to deliver enter on what knowledge the community would like to see tracked and what ambitions the prosecutor need to test to get to.

The corporation stated it is hoping to aid solve the trouble of a shortage in transparency and accountability by encouraging communities and legal justice units uncover widespread floor.

“When the general public, law enforcement, prosecutors and courts share and believe in the very same data, those people info become the popular ground for dialogue and reform,” Steps for Justice claims on its website.

To use Commons, the prosecutor’s office would have to have to be in a position to present the uncooked info from neighborhood situations that is desired for evaluation. Eaton said a great deal of that knowledge is collected and managed by the condition, by way of a statewide prosecutor scenario administration system.

Eaton reported the data that is collected by the point out is not in a format that lends itself to analysis or acquiring styles.

“This really would assistance me to have an strategy of not only what’s going on with the prosecutor’s business office but with the courts,” he said.

County council members who read about the procedure at a current assembly mentioned they were being interested in the strategy of using the software.

“Everything we do is costly, and if we can evaluate outcomes via this, which is what it is all about,” council member Jeannine Gray stated.

Council member Keely Butrum claimed she favored the plan of getting ready to observe how quite a few defendants are in psychological overall health and drug recovery packages and what the outcomes are for individuals people.

“It presents you the objective posts for are we providing folks enough likelihood, are we giving people today too a lot of chances,” she reported.

Other folks asked regardless of whether the software would be practical if the county weren’t ready to assess its info to very similar Indiana counties. Eaton mentioned that as significantly as he is conscious, no other counties in the condition are preparing to use Commons, but it can be used to accumulate some details about how the county compares to other jurisdictions all-around the place.

Eaton said he is functioning on getting an estimate of the charge of the software, but mentioned it would most likely be all-around $250,000 as a startup charge, together with ongoing servicing charges. He reported he’s not significantly sufficient into the method to know how substantially work retaining the process would generate or whether a new worker would need to be employed.

Council users asked Eaton to occur again to a potential conference with more data about how substantially it would charge to take part. Far more information on the Commons application and illustrations of how it is made use of by other communities can be discovered on the web at measuresforjustice.org.