NCJ Number
213891
Journal
Corrections Today Magazine Volume: 68 Issue: 2 Dated: April 2006 Pages: 152-155
Date Published
April 2006
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This article discusses the problems encountered by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) in complying with the Federal Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA)--which requires that all State and local correctional agencies implement policies to counter prison rape, sexual assault, and harassment--and the solutions developed to meet the Act's requirements.
Abstract
In order to identify the best ways for the DOC to comply with the Act, a task force was created. During initial task force meetings, major problems were found in the collection of sexual assault data as defined by the Act. The DOC had no established policies and procedures for recording or tracking those data, and any relevant existing data were in a variety of unlinked databases. The task force's approach to tracking prison sexual assault data was to use a Web-enabled Temporal Analysis System (WebTAS), which was originally developed for the Air Force in its collection and analysis of intelligence. WebTAS is a flexible data access, query, and analysis tool that can operate across an enterprise or within a client server environment. The key data access components of WebTAS enable sites to connect to multiple external data sources with little or no programming. Analysts can query data sources for specific information and then display the results in a manner that highlights significant events. A Federal grant was awarded to the DOC for the implementation of WebTAS in tracking sexual assault data at the DOC's 26 institutions. This article describes the components of WebTAS and its potential future uses. The components provide for data collection and analysis of prison sexual assault events, offender characteristics, victim characteristics, and in what institutions sexual assaults are occurring. 4 illustrations