The Compiler

              Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority Winter/Spring 2006
Illinois making strides in quest for an
integrated justice information system
(Continued on page 2)
By Karen S. Levy McCanna and Wil Nagel
If two people don’t speak the same
language, can they communicate
effectively? Can they communicate
at all?
What is true for people is also true for
information systems. And, unfortunately,
many computer systems designed to
serve criminal justice and law enforce-ment
agencies in Illinois lack a common
language.
In the meantime, agencies across Illi-nois
must share information to facilitate
day-to-day operation of the justice sys-tem.
Police share information with
prosecutors and prosecutors file
charges with the courts. When a defen-dant
is convicted and sentenced,
information must be sent from the courts
to the Department of Corrections. These
are just a few of the data exchanges
necessary to the administration of jus-tice
in Illinois.
But state criminal justice and law en-forcement
officials foresee a time when
vital information will be electronically
shared among police departments, gov-ernment
agencies, courts, and other
criminal justice entities in Illinois. De-velopment
of integrated computer
systems is recognized as a priority issue
by the criminal justice community and
has been in planning since 2001.
The ability to share information is the
main goal of the Illinois Integrated Jus-tice
Information Systems (IIJIS) Project,
an outgrowth of the Authority’s Criminal
Justice Planning Summit convened in
June 1999. An executive order created
the IIJIS initiative after the release of the
June 2001 Criminal Justice Plan, a sum-mit-
prepared document that cited the
lack of a coordinated criminal justice
information-sharing system.
Illinois is not the only state with law
enforcement communication problems.
Nationwide, a variety of justice informa-tion
systems have been designed to fill
the specific needs of individual agen-cies.
Users of these systems often resist
PUBLICATIONS 3 RESEARCH 4 GRANTS 6 TECHNOLOGY 8
Secretary of State Jesse
White gives opening
remarks at the Illinois
Integrated Justice
Information System Summit
in June 2005. Public officials
have joined criminal justice
practitioners and the law
enforcement community
in pursuit of a single
integrated system that
would allow statewide
information sharing.
(Photo by
Deborah Trainor)