If you’re a sports fan of any kind, you know how obsessive player and team stats can become. And every sport has a lot of measures, some reasonable – some debatable. Chief among them is baseball.
Bill James, a renowned and controversial statistician and writer, is best known for his analytical contributions to major league baseball. His notable achievement is the creation of the Pythagorean Theorem of baseball, known as the Pythagorean winning percentage.
The concept is simple. It’s an attempt to determine the number of games that a team should have won, based on its total number of runs scored versus its number of runs allowed to better forecast that team's future outlook.
For football fans, some believe passer rate is a strong indicator of team success.
Hockey fans may scrutinize an advanced analytic called corsi, which measures the shot attempt differential while at even strength. Put simply, it scrutinizes puck possession time as an indicator of team strength.
So, if you’re running a jail or a prison, what’s the Pythagorean Theorem for Corrections? Is there an equivalent passer rate or corsi for line staff performance?
In this blog, we’re going to talk about some key performance indicators (KPIs) that you may want to consider, all of which are supported in Command Cloud, the officer experience platform.
Let’s get started.
What is a KPI?
First things first. A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a measurable value that reflects how effectively a person, team, or organization is achieving a specific objective. KPIs can track progress (or regressions) towards goals, and are evaluative over time.
Sometimes in business, you hear about “measuring what matters.” John Doerr wrote a book on this very subject. He also invented the goal-setting framework Objectives and Key Results or “OKRs” to define measurable goals and track their outcomes.
Measuring what matters can be useful. It can also oversimplify complex matters or situations that are subjective and multifaceted. Focusing too narrowly on a single metric (e.g. productivity) can obscure other important aspects, such as employee well-being or long-term sustainability.
Overall, KPIs focus on these key metrics to gauge to provide insight into long-term performance:
- Objective
- Measurement
- Optimization
- Strategy
- Performance
- Indicator
- Evaluation
What KPIs Does Command Cloud Measure?
Command Cloud measures and analyzes hundreds of data points based on your team’s performance across a wide range of custody operations. These measures come from four main sources in Command Cloud:
- Web-based dashboards
- SQL-based reporting that extracts, analyzes, and presents data from your Command Cloud database
- Business intelligence (BI)
- Machine learning (ML)
Let’s walk you through some of the most widely used KPIs used today in Command Cloud:
Rounds Compliance
Rounds compliance is a measure of the total rounds completed within the maximum check time divided by the total rounds completed. It’s expressed as a percentage. You can measure rounds compliance by individual, shift, day, date range, or other parameters you can select.
It’s a straightforward measure that can help evaluate performance on arguably one of the most frequently performed and essential responsibilities of corrections.
Dangerous Supplies Outstanding
This is the total number of potentially dangerous or hazardous items outstanding to your inmate population. Filterable by location, you can see the total number of razors, clippers, cleaning supplies, and other items issued to inmates by staff who are not on a special status, such as “Suicidal.” This can be helpful, especially at shift change, when the oncoming shift may not be fully aware of items given to inmates by the prior shift.
This measure was first introduced in 2005 in version 1.0 of GUARDIAN RFID and is still widely used today by Command Cloud users.
Late Check Supervisory Review
This standard of measure quantifies and visualizes any late checks during your shift. If your facility has a policy that requires staff to log justifications for late checks, such as a fight that broke out or there was a health emergency to respond to, supervisors can review and approve late checks at the end of their shift.
Time Away
New to Command Cloud, Time Away is a concept that builds on previous generations of GUARDIAN RFID software but delivers a metric that has even more value. Time Away is a simple concept of calculating (in real-time) the total length an inmate has been logged as being outside of their cell and in an out-of-cell location, such as court holding.
For example, rather than showing what time an inmate was logged going to a court holding cell, it’ll instead show how long they’ve been in court holding (hence “Time Away”). Time Away counts up in minutes from the time they entered a location, versus showing what time they entered.
Recreation Compliance
Some states heavily scrutinize whether inmates have received sufficient recreation time. In Texas, for example, each inmate is required to have one hour of recreation or exercise time at least three days a week.
In Command Cloud, you can use the Recreation Compliance dashboard to visualize all inmates who have or have not received recreation sufficient to meet compliance standards in seconds.
Staggering Score
Perhaps the only measure in this list of KPIs intended for the elite officer, meaning you’re amongst the top 10% of all performing correctional officers in the U.S., is Staggering Score.
Staggering Score is a quantifiable measure of how random (or predictable) you complete your security rounds and observation checks at frequencies such as 15, 30, and 60 minutes. What’s powerful about Staggering Score is that it uses machine learning to identify your patterns of behavior. It then recommends times to start your next set of rounds to increase your irregular round pattern, keeping inmates on their toes.
Staggering Score helps you close the window of time in which inmates anticipate you’ll start your rounds based on their observation of your patterns, and the time you leave, so they can resume their violent or illicit behavior.
Based on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being perfectly unpredictable or random, and 1 being completely predictable, Staggering Score updates daily for each officer over three dimensions of performance: 15-, 30-, and 60-minute checks.
Meals Dashboard
Of the dozens of dashboards in Operational Intelligence (OI), the business intelligence layer of Command Cloud is one of the most widely used, and it is the Meals Dashboard. The problem the Meals Dashboard solves is that it visualizes the number of days since certain inmates have last accepted a meal.
There are times in which shifts may under communicate the frequency in which an inmate refuses to eat – and all of a sudden – an inmate has refused to eat nine times in four days, but a shift may only be looking at the past 10 hours.
With the Meals dashboard, it’s impossible to miss emerging trends like this – even if they’re not properly communicated. You can also look at data points such as the total number of meals declined each day or shift – as well as the percentage declined. And since these are diagnostic dashboards, you can click on each graph or chart and interactively drill-down to better understand what the data means.
Measuring what matters is right in many circumstances. While it can run some risk if what’s being measured is too subjective or complex, there are many universal measures that every jail, prison, and juvenile detention facility should consider having as part of their core operations.
KPIs can help identify individual, team, and organizational alignment and improvement. Conversely, KPIs can measure regression or opportunities for improvement.
Take stock of identifying what problems or objectives you are trying to solve. How can you properly capture data in a scalable, sustainable way? Then ask yourself: how can you effectively measure performance areas important to you? Don’t overlook these questions when you’re considering deploying an inmate tracking system or an officer experience platform.
