NCJ Number
146951
Journal
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology Volume: 26 Issue: 3 Dated: (December 1993) Pages: 232-250
Date Published
1993
Length
19 pages
Annotation
After explaining the reasons for developing an offender-based tracking system in Western Australia, this article examines some conceptual and technical issues that have arisen.
Abstract
In 1989, the Crime Research Centre (University of Western Australia) and criminal justice agencies in Western Australia became involved in the INOIS (Integrated Numerical Offender Identification System) project. The primary aim of this project was to develop a common, unique identifier for offenders. This would allow the establishment of a longitudinal database that could "track" offender through the criminal justice system. Central to the development of the database and, therefore, to the INOIS project, was the underlying need to identify each offender. The author focuses on how record-linking techniques were used to achieve this. A discussion of the record-linking component of the INOIS project is followed by the presentation of results from trials and preliminary runs of the linkage system. Results from the trials and preliminary runs led agencies to investigate their internal data collection systems to determine why some records that were expected to match had failed to be linked to any police records. Future work must overcome some coverage problems of the system and fully assess the quality of the link results. Nevertheless, the project has had some success in introducing and distributing a common, unique offender identifier throughout the criminal justice system at small cost and with minimal human resources. 22 notes and 19 references