Washington County Outreach wants data. It could take years to find.

WASHINGTON - Washington County Outreach’s new director, Joe Williams, has made a handful of changes since starting the job earlier this year.

The office tasked with court-ordered probation supervision is working with more systematic methods, and focusing more heavily on connecting those in the system with mental health services, according to its new leader.

Williams’ long-term goal, for the moment, is to gather more data on the outcomes of people in the county after they complete their probation, either by meeting all of its terms, or by being discharged. Doing so, he says, will benefit the department and the public.

“I feel that the people of this county need to know that it is working, it is making the county safer, it is producing productive members of society,” he said. “And this data’s going to show me whether an idea’s working or not. So do I need to adjust the idea, do I need scrap the idea? It’ll help me, in the long run, decide if what I’ve implemented is going to work.”

Specifically, Williams is looking for recidivism rates, and the severity of crimes committed by people who re-offend after completing probation. While the information is already accessible for re-offenders in Washington County who get referred to Outreach by the courts, those who leave the community before re-offending can go unnoticed by area officials.

Combined, he said the data should offer an accurate assessment of risks and recovery time for future clients, and give a picture of which tailored treatment plans that do and don’t help individuals bounce back from whatever circumstances landed them in a courtroom to begin with.

All of the information is available to Washington County Outreach, at least in theory. But thus far, it’s proven difficult to consolidate.

Data about a person’s background gets to Williams’ desk when a court orders them to contact the outreach office, and information about their respective treatment plan is generated as Williams personally creates it. But translating that information into a usable dataset would be technically challenging and quite time consuming, if it’s not matched with recidivism data to make it worthwhile.

Court records about any alleged crime in Iowa are publicly accessible with a modest annual fee to the state, and federal records are also available in exchange for minor payments with every document. But both rely on manually searching names and cases one at a time: neither is easy to use en masse, especially if a user doesn’t know where to look. Williams said manually keeping tabs on all 125 individuals currently in the system, once they finish probation, would be next to impossible.

The outreach director says he believes the information already exists, somewhere. He just needs to figure out where to look, and how to access it.

“I need to figure out who does tracking for recidivism, I don’t know if there’s like, a program you can get, or how that works,” Williams said. “I really just need to figure out how to start. If I can figure out how to start, then I can take it from there.”

To that end, Williams said he planned to consult a handful of state probation officers and officials to ask for help. If they can’t offer it, he intends to reach out to other states with more intensive re-offender tracking programs.

Getting the information in the first place is only half the battle.

Once the county has access to the hard numbers, Williams said it would take at least five years to garner meaningful insight about recidivism rates.

“With recidivism, you’re not really going to be able to see much in a year,” he said. “Tracking recidivism can take some time. If you’re implementing some time to get that data accurate, it’s going to take a little bit of time.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com