Project Description

ARHU

Introduction

Business Problem

  • CDCR wants to ensure officers comply with regulations and limit lawsuits.
  • New policy rolling out on November 1st 2023, requires all RHUs (solitary confinement) to offer 15 – 25 hours of yard time.
  • Move individuals out of RHUs faster and focus more on rehabilitation.
  • Reduce the time Officers spend filling out the 114-A. Estimated 2 -4 hours per day, depending on the size of the unit.
  • Reduce the Sergeant’s time spent preparing weekly reports.

User Problem

  • The current paper process is difficult to audit.
  • The documentation process is time-intensive, resulting in overtime and other duties not being prioritized.
  • The paper process is dependent on legible handwriting.
  • Unit Sergeants spend a 1 day a week preparing this report.
  • The officer in the unit with the best handwriting is stuck in the role.
  • Legislation and leadership have unrealistic expectations.

Solution

The solution is desktop-based and allows officers to record which actions are taken and what is offered to each inmate, approximately at the time it is offered. There was a lot of desire for a tablet-based solution as well, but this was unable to do a full rollout.

Success Metrics

  • # meals per day
  • # showers per week
  • # phone calls per week
  • ~20+ hours outside of cell per week for inmates
  • data is clear and accessible for passing audits.
  • Time reduction to 15 minutes per day for Officers
  • Time reduction to 1 hour per week for Sergeants

Expected Result

Custody Officers & Sergeants are more efficient.

Audits are done in hours as opposed to weeks.

Increased focus on rehabilitation for inmates.

CDCR is in compliance with regulations.

Logistics

Scope

  • This project lasted 1.5 years before going into (Maintenance and Operations) mode.
  • I was on the project for about the first year, then handed it off to 2 designers after reaching production.
  • We pushed our MVP to production in 52 RHUs across the state in less than 9 months, launching our pilot in July and meeting our November deadline.

My Role

Lead Designer for the contract and this project.

Team Make Up

Team Role Hours / Sprint
Product Manager 2 Full Time
UX Designer Full Time
Full Stack Devs 7 Full time

Solution

Roster shows who is in the Unit and some of the main offerings.

Activities let you click into a detail view and show what was offered, not offered, refused, and submitted.

Appointments occur less frequently than activities and are distinct enough to warrant their own category.

Meals are one of the primary activities offered 3 times a day.

Yard time is scheduled, but can be offered at other times as well to try and hit new goals for how much time inmates spend outside. The associated amount of time must be recorded.

Each inmate has a history page including all offerings and refusals. Custody Officers are also required to add in comments for specific types of refusals such as a hunger strike.

Outcomes

  • Over 4000 users onboarded in 3 months!

  • 94% time reduction for Custody Officers, resulting in a savings of $3.4 million per year!

  • Tracking information for roughly 5000 inmates.

  • 10 activities recorded per inmate per day!

  • 93% time reduction for Seargents resulting in savings of $1.2 millions per year!

Discovery & Strategy

The Beginning

  • The original scope of the project had funding for 1.5 years. Our goal was to have our MVP ready in 9 months.
  • The primary Pm and I kicked off the project with Stakeholders 2 weeks before our engineering team came on board.
  • During these 2 weeks, we carried out “Discovery & Framing” and built out a backlog.

Challenges

  • A complication for this project was that California regulations were changing regarding the RHUs and the time inmates spent performing certain activities.
  • Some of our users had an “us vs them” attitude regarding leadership and auditors. Few people enjoy feeling like they are being monitored.
  • Each Warden at each Prison is allowed to dictate and change policy at their institution. This does not make it easy to align on practice.
  • There were outdated laws from the 70’s regarding the recording of inmate activity. The team’s PM and I worked with Policy Makers to make adjustments.
  • It can not be understated how difficult and scary it is to work in one of these units as an officer.

This was one of the storage solutions being implemented at the time.

  • Custody officers with the best handwriting are forced to do the 114A.
  • Combined with less-than-optimal storage methods, audits were difficult, if not impossible.

Onsite Research

  • There are 4 main RHU layouts within California Prisons.
  • I visited multiple institutions and interviewed and shadowed Custody Officers at as many institutions as possible.
  • Most users were used to paper processes and had little technical aptitude. This also made remote research more difficult.
  • Restricted Housing Units, or RHUs, used to be called solitary confinement. It is where you go when you commit crimes inside prison.
  • In the image to my left, one of the PMs and I are feeling much more relaxed after a lockdown due to a small riot.
  • This was some of the most intense user research I have ever done. This led to most of my visits and research being done solo and without the use of technology.
  • RHUs do not allow non-CDCR devices.

Definition & Research

After speaking with Stakeholders and understanding their goals. I visited 5 institutions and spoke with 17 Custody Officers and 6 Sergeants. Meeting with a large number of users from various institutions was critical because each institution is allowed to have different processes. We needed to make sure our process would not only meet legislative requirements, but also work for all users at 35 institutions across California. There are also several types of RHUs across the state with different requirements that had to be accounted for.

Who are Custody Officers in an RHU?

  • Graduated from Highschoool but few are college educated.
  • Have not lived or moved far from home.
  • Are not tech-savvy and only use computers for work.
  • Do not like being monitored.
  • Have an “us vs them” mentality with leadership.
  • Have an extremely difficult job. This can not be understated.

Below are RHU  yard time requirements per the type of Restricted Housing Unit.

Why does it matter?

  • There are currently frequent lawsuits against the CDCR from inmates who are kept within RHUs.
  • The current process is paper-based and is incredibly difficult to audit.
  • Understanding what is recorded depends largely on the legibility of an officer’s handwriting.
  • Officers in RHUs are required to spend a significant amount of time on this process, resulting in hundreds of overtime hours and time spent not attending to other duties.
  • There are currently frequent lawsuits against the CDCR from inmates who are kept within RHUs.
  • The current process is paper-based and is incredibly difficult to audit.
  • Understanding what is recorded depends largely on the legibility of an officer’s handwriting.
  • Officers in RHUs are required to spend a significant amount of time on this process, resulting in hundreds of overtime hours and time spent not attending to other duties.
  • There are currently frequent lawsuits against the CDCR from inmates who are kept within RHUs.
  • The current process is paper-based and is incredibly difficult to audit.
  • Understanding what is recorded depends largely on the legibility of an officer’s handwriting.
  • Officers in RHUs are required to spend a significant amount of time on this process, resulting in hundreds of overtime hours and time spent not attending to other duties.

Analysis & Ideas

After collecting data and sharing out with the team. I ran an exercise with the team to determine our priorities.

Changing the Regulation based on real user behavior.

Regulations passed in the 1970’s required Custody Officers to record inmates’ answers on paper after speaking to each individual inmate. This practice was no longer realistically followed due to the increased demand for custody officers’ time. In addition, the paper process was difficult to audit, and leadership prioritized larger issues. The ideal hardware for our solution was a tablet; however, not all institutions have access to wifi. This meant our initial solution had work on desktop and tablet. We would roll out the dekstop version first to all institutions, then the tablet version for the institutions with wifi. All of this had to be communicated and coordinated with policy and regulation makers. They had to understand timelines and how we would meet the goals of the regulations so that we could build an application that Custody Officers would actually use.

The end result was that Institutions with the desktop solution had Custody Officers ask up to 15 inmates, then go back to record, while institutions with tablets would have Custody Officers make entries as they made rounds with inmates. Each institution is moving into compliance after wifi and tablets are made available.

Design & Iteration

Quick Sketches

  1. Users did not want to feel like they were under a microscope or being audited.
  2. Change was seen as the enemy, and custody officers did not want “Leadership” making calls without them.
  3. There was initially excitement about a mobile solution, but this was not technically viable.

Initial Designs in Figma

There was initially a large focus on the different types of activities and or services offered. I tested each design with the officers prior to determining which ones could utilize similar design elements.

Second Iteration

Implementation & Collaboration

This project required our team to work with a large number of different groups and roles across CDCR and within the State. Communicating and keeping everybody up to date, understanding, and in alignment was no small task. Regular share outs, demos and workshops kept things moving along soothe application could be live by the date California Law went into effect. Here are some of the groups we worked with.

  • Regulation makers
  • Multiple levels of CDCR leadership
  • Custody Officers
  • RHU Seargents
  • Auditors
  • Courts
  • The Union

Another trial to overcome in this project had to do with “RHU Custody Officers” feeling like they were being put under a microscope. We did not want them to feel that way, but in truth, they were. The whole reason for the project is that CDCR had multiple complaints filed against it and had been sued on multiple occasions by inmates being held in RHUs. The previous process was so messy and unclear that it was almost impossible to audit and prove that CDCR was not negligent. We worked extensively with users from across the state, made sure that they felt heard and multiple times made a case for them to regulation makers and CDCR Leadership.

Evaluation & Observation

Custody Officer Feedback

“The 114-A process is easy as hell now.”

“I actually have time to eat lunch now!”

Seargent Quotes

“Everything is here, and I don’t have to track people down because I can’t read their writing. My weekly audit takes me 30 minutes instead of all day”

“This used to take 2 Custody Officers all day. Now it takes one Officer about 15 minutes!”

“Officers love it, and it is only getting easier for them. My life is 90% better than it was because of this app and these reports. Now I am just asking for sprinkles on top!”

Auditor Quote

“This process used to take weeks. Now it takes us a few hours. We can trust the data coming in to us.”

Conclusion

While our team was getting out hands dirty, Secretary Jeff Macomber saw an opportunity to rehabilitate incarcerated persons in RHUs by giving more outside or yard time. In addition, he asked our team to work with CDCR educators to start a program and application to track the time inmates spend educating themselves, reducing the time they spend in RHUs.

Overall, we managed to have several big wins on this project.

  1. Cut the time custody officers spend on data entry by more than 90%.
  2. Lowered the number of Lawsuits against CDCR within the first 3 months. Enough to pay for the whole project.
  3. Ensured inmates get to spend significantly more time outside of their cell while being held in an RHU.
  4. Provided an opportunity for inmates to get out of RHUs more quickly through self-education and rehabilitation.
  5. Clear and quick audits. What used to take a team of 15 to 20 people up to 2 months to do per institution now only takes one person a few days.

This had to be one of the smoothest projects I have ever been on, and a big part of that came from close collaboration between design, product, and engineering. I think one of our biggest hurdles had to do with tablets, wi-fi, and that each institution within the state had differing levels of ability to implement a tablet solution or even have wi-fi. There are around 35 institutions within California and each Warden has almost complete control to do as they see fit. This means that they might all get a certain amount of money for something like wi-fi or tablets, but each of them might spend it differently depending on the details of the policy. Being the “middleman” of these conversations and creating understanding between multiple groups with different goals and priorities was challenging and time-consuming, but ultimately was probably the most important part of this project.

The project received the “Best of” Award by the California Government Innovation Summit!