Re-Validation of the Florida Department of Corrections' Correctional Operations Trend Analysis System (COTAS)

摘要

This report provides a re-validation of the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) Correctional Operations Trend Analysis System (COTAS) by two reviewers, one from Florida State Universitys (FSU) College of Criminology and Criminal Justices Center for Criminology and Public Policy and one from Infinity Software. COTAS is designed to serve as a tool for DOC staff and administrators in identifying issues before they develop by consolidating historical information with a predictive scoring system made readily available on a comprehensive website. COTAS provides DOC staff and administrators with two types of statistics, descriptive and predictive. Descriptive statistics from COTAS provide a summary of violent and non-violent events that occurred within DOC regions and facilities within the prior 30 days. This data can be drilled down to examine the prevalence of events at the facility, dorm, and inmate levels. Predictive statistics from COTAS provide the predicted probability of individual inmates involvement in violent events. Predictions are generated by an algorithm, which uses historical data to examine the relationship between inmate and facility characteristics and inmates involvement in violent events. Both descriptive and predictive statistics are reported to the user in a web-based dashboard interface.