80 FR 52796 - Offender Monitoring Analytics Market Survey

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Office of Justice Programs

Federal Register Volume 80, Issue 169 (September 1, 2015)

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is soliciting information in support of the upcoming National Criminal Justice Technology Research, Test, and Evaluation Center (NIJ RT&E Center) ``Market Survey of Offender Monitoring Analytics (OMA) Technologies.'' This market survey, which will address offender monitoring in community settings, will be published by NIJ to assist agencies in their assessment of relevant information prior to making purchasing decisions on commercially-available systems being marketed for use by criminal justice professionals. The NIJ RT&E Center also invites comments with regard to the market survey itself, including which categories of information are appropriate for comparison, as well as promotional material (e.g., slick sheets) and print-quality images in electronic format.

[Federal Register Volume 80, Number 169 (Tuesday, September 1, 2015)]
[Notices]
[Pages 52796-52798]
From the Federal Register Online  [www.thefederalregister.org]
[FR Doc No: 2015-21564]


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DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

Office of Justice Programs

[OJP (NIJ) Docket No. 1693]


Offender Monitoring Analytics Market Survey

AGENCY: National Institute of Justice, Justice.

ACTION: Notice of request for information.

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SUMMARY: The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is soliciting 
information in support of the upcoming National Criminal Justice 
Technology Research, Test, and Evaluation Center (NIJ RT&E Center) 
``Market Survey of Offender Monitoring Analytics (OMA) Technologies.'' 
This market survey, which will address offender monitoring in community 
settings, will be published by NIJ to assist agencies in their 
assessment of relevant information prior to making purchasing decisions 
on commercially-available systems being marketed for use by criminal 
justice professionals. The NIJ RT&E Center also invites comments with 
regard to the market survey itself, including which categories of 
information are appropriate for comparison, as well as promotional 
material (e.g., slick sheets) and print-quality images in electronic 
format.

DATES: Responses to this request will be accepted through 11:59 p.m. 
Eastern Daylight Time on September 25, 2015.

ADDRESSES: Responses to this request may be submitted electronically in 
the body of or as an attachment to an email sent to 
[email protected] with the recommended subject line ``OMA 
Federal Register Response''. Questions and responses may also be sent 
by mail (please allow additional time for processing) to the following 
address: National Criminal Justice Technology Research, Test and 
Evaluation Center, ATTN: OMA Federal Register Response, Johns Hopkins 
University Applied Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Mail 
Stop 17-N444, Laurel, MD 20723-6099.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: For more information on this request, 
please contact Hal Heaton (NIJ RT&E Center) by telephone at 443-778-
5025 or [email protected]. For more information on the NIJ 
RT&E Center, visit http://nij.gov/funding/awards/Pages/award-detail.aspx?award=2013-MU-CX-K111 and view the description or contact 
Jack Harne (NIJ) by telephone at 202-616-2911 or at 
[email protected]. Please note that these are not toll-free 
telephone numbers.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
    Information Sought: The NIJ RT&E Center seeks input to its upcoming 
``Market Survey of Offender Monitoring Analytics (OMA) Technologies,'' 
which seeks to identify commercially-available products being marketed 
to the offender monitoring community to facilitate the discovery and 
communication of meaningful patterns in diverse data that address their 
strategic and tactical information needs. OMA products may (but aren't 
necessarily restricted to) use various combinations of statistical 
analysis procedures, data and text mining, and predictive modeling to 
proactively analyze information on community-released offenders to 
discover hidden relationships and patterns in their behaviors and to 
predict future outcomes. They may feature dashboards (i.e., user-
interfaces) that provide easily understandable information in either 
real-time or off-line to a wide variety of professionals, which are 
customizable to permit command staff, Probation and Parole Officers 
(PPOs), crime analysts, and officers on the street to view all content

[[Page 52797]]

permitted by their roles, permissions and information technology 
devices.
    Usage: This market survey will be published by NIJ to assist 
agencies in their assessment of relevant information prior to making 
purchasing decisions. Whether an agency faces a mandate to monitor the 
habits of offenders released into the community, institute proactive 
policing by performing crime-scene correlation, or to more effectively 
allocate resources based on real-time planning, OMA technologies can 
provide cost-effective tools for quickly extracting actionable 
knowledge from the plethora of available data.
    Information Categories: The NIJ RT&E Center invites comments with 
regard to the market survey, including which categories of information 
are appropriate for comparison, as well as promotional material and 
print-quality images (e.g., of analytical graphics and associated 
dashboards) in electronic format.
    At a minimum, the Center intends to include the following 
categories of information for each OMA model, service, or product:

1. Vendor Information:
    a. Name
    b. Address of corporate office
    c. Years your company has been in the OMA business
2. Product Information:
    a. Product name and version number
    b. Purpose of the OMA product
    c. Intended market (e.g., community corrections, crime-scene 
correlation)
    d. Method for accessing product (e.g., purchase, lease, vendor-
hosted)
    e. Installation options (e.g., stand-alone package or networkable)
    f. Time required to install the software on compatible computers
    g. Supporting (i.e., tethered) software packages required to 
implement/use the OMA product (including their version numbers)
    h. Licenses required to use the product and/or tethered software
    i. Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price for the base product, 
including licenses
    j. Cost of any tethered software, including licenses
    k. Terms and cost of any standard and extended warranties offered
    l. Software version-upgrade approach (e.g., expected release 
frequency, cost)
    m. Approach and cost to customers for post-procurement technical 
assistance
3. Performance Characteristics and Validation:
    a. Criminal justice (or other) requirements the product was 
developed to address
    b. How the tool adds value to and differs from other commercial 
products
    c. Whether the product offers configurable levels of Administrative 
Privileges
    d. Approach for evaluating whether the product meets user needs 
(e.g., repeat customers, interviews, satisfaction surveys)
    e. Whether and how product performance has been verified and 
validated
    f. Examples of the OMA product's impact on users
4. Analyses Performed by the Product (minimum Y/N; additional detail 
welcomed):
    a. Geospatial analysis of offender habits;
     Track individual offenders
     Track groups of offenders
     Offender stop-analysis and drill-down capabilities
     Offender association monitoring/congregation analyses
     Entity-resolution
     Identify patterns of activity
     Visually differentiate client data points obtained on 
different days
     Victim monitoring
    b. Geo-contextualization of offender habits on commercially-
available maps and/or archived imagery (Identify compatible mapping and 
imagery products);
     Perform geocoding and reverse geocoding
     Provide both aerial and street views of local and regional 
scenes
     Overlay points-of-interest on maps/imagery (e.g., offender 
residences, public transportation types/routes, schools, parks and 
other landmarks)
     Conduct geographic profiling
     Heat maps
    c. Social Network Analysis
    d. Automated crime-scene correlation with offender space-time 
habits;
     Requires separate analysis of the data acquired from each 
jurisdiction
     Requires separate analysis of the habits of each offender
     Encompasses multiple jurisdictions over defined space-time 
windows and all offenders monitored by a PPO
     User specification of time and distance thresholds for 
analyzing events
     Ability to hover over map points-of-interest to obtain 
more information
     Identification of possible travel routes following 
commission of a crime
     Automatic creation (and updating) of offender watch lists
    e. Case-load management planning by PPOs;
     Definition of curfews (i.e., confinement and restriction 
zones)
    [rtarr8] Creation of global zones
    [rtarr8] Creation of free-form zones
    [rtarr8] Configuration of zones as circles, rectangles or arbitrary 
polygons
    [rtarr8] Customization of monitoring parameters to individual 
offenders
    [rtarr8] Application of established zones to more than one client
    [rtarr8] Creation of zone templates for certain classes of 
participants
    [rtarr8] Implementation of mobile restriction zones
    [rtarr8] Setting of warm zones around hot zones
     Review of tracking points and approval of acceptable 
behavior
     Automated configuration of logged events as alerts when 
appropriate, and implementation of event escalation procedures
    f. Basic predictive modeling (e.g., spatial regression analysis);
     Prediction of offender behavioral trends
     Prediction of good candidates for community monitoring
     Next-event forecasting based on linked crime-incident 
locations
     Computation of statistical significance of spatial-
temporal crime repetition probabilities (e.g., using Monte Carlo 
simulation techniques)
     The location of a serial offender anchor point(s)
    g. Additional capabilities not covered above (please list)
5. Data Formatting and Information Exchange:
    a. Method for entering/accessing/exchanging data (e.g., manual, 
created using other applications (list them), Web Services, other);
     Data sharing protocols adopted (e.g., NIEM)
     Acceptable data-input file formats (e.g., ASCII files, 
.csv text files, .shp, .dbf, .bmp, other)
     Number of data-streams that can be concurrently monitored
     Ability/need to create a new database that aggregates the 
acquired data, and if so, the data-basing approach (e.g., relational, 
semantic)
    b. Type and purpose of any databases supplied with the analytics 
software
    c. Additional databases that must be accessed to operate the 
software
    d. Known issues germane to easily integrating the software with 
existing criminal justice information systems and technology
    e. Analytic products provided by the

[[Page 52798]]

OMA software in real-time, as well as those that require post-
processing;
     Underlying statistical approach used to produce product 
(e.g., cluster analysis, autocorrelation analysis, others)
    f. Ability/need to export output files to other applications for 
further analyses
    g. Output file formats produced by the analytics software (e.g., 
.kml, .shp, .csv)
    h. Method for maintaining cyber-security of the data and analysis 
products
    i. Method for protecting confidentiality of personally-identifiable 
information
    j. Types of available reports and the extent to which they are 
customizable
    k. Standard dashboard configurations provided by the product
6. Requirements for Host Agency Computing Systems:
    a. Computer operating systems capable of running the product
    b. Minimum amount of RAM (GB), hard disk space (GB), and speed 
(MHz) required to install and run the OMA product on each type of 
operating system
    c. Minimum graphics board (e.g., must support OpenGL 1.0) and 
display (e.g., size, resolution, color levels) requirements for each 
type of operating system
    d. Approximate amount of time taken to provide the principal 
analysis products on computers configured to meet these minimum 
requirements
    e. Whether the product must be used with a particular vendor's 
offender monitoring technology or is vendor-agnostic
7. Operator/Analyst Training Requirements:
    a. Minimum education level/experience needed to set-up and operate 
the software (e.g., high-school level knowledge of computers; college-
level statistics to create required input files and select appropriate 
options)
    b. Minimum education/experience needed to interpret the output 
results
    c. Number of training hours necessary to set-up/operate the product
    d. Types of available documentation and training aids (e.g., 
embedded help files, accessible help desk, user manuals, on-line 
instruction videos, screen shots; sample data; training classes)
    e. Support programs the user must be familiar with to use the tool.

    Dated: August 21, 2015.
Nancy Rodriguez,
Director, National Institute of Justice.
[FR Doc. 2015-21564 Filed 8-31-15; 8:45 am]
 BILLING CODE 4410-18-P