The trial of Dano Sonnex and Nigel Farmer, convicted last week for the brutal murder of two French students at a time when Sonnex should have been in custody, has brought the spotlight back to the inefficiencies of the criminal justice system.

Among the blunders was the failure to identify Sonnex as a high-risk offender; that it took 33 days for a warrant to be issued to send him back to prison; and that the courts mistakenly released him on bail. All these incidents highlight slow processes and the lack of information being in the right place at the right time.

The criminal justice system is notoriously fragmented. It has evolved in such a fashion that it is still largely paper based, and IT systems that do exist are rarely able to talk to each other.

Andrew Gay, interim chief information officer (CIO) at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), told the Modernising Justice through IT conference in London last week that 382 organisations were affiliated to the MoJ.

“That’s 382 IT systems. I can’t tell you how inefficient the process is sometimes. One case I saw was remanded 14 times because the file had been lost because of pressures on the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] and the lack of electronic files –­ the dots are just not joined up,” he said.

The direction that the system must take to improve its efficiency is clear, said Gay ­ – what is less clear is how to get there.

“Each one of these prisoners is an individual and information has to travel with him all the way through the system,” said Gay. “There’s no end to the efficiencies and improvements we can make by having the right information in the right place at the right time.”

Nomis ­ – the long-awaited offender management system that began rollout this month ­ – will help. But it works only for prisons and probation officers, leaving large parts of the criminal justice system excluded, including youth justice workers, the CPS, and the police.

Progress is partly hamstrung by the privacy debate, according to Mike Mackay, CIO of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales.

“On the one hand you have your head telling you the rational argument for unique identifiers and the centralising of information, and on the other you have people’s hearts, which are opposed to such a system. That’s a national debate to be had,” he said.

Similarly in the police service, one electronic case file for the lifetime of a case on a defendant is vital, according to Jan Berry, who is conducting an inquiry for the Home Office on reducing bureaucracy in police forces.

“Currently, the CPS has a different case file to the police, and the defendant’s defence team can often not access those parts of the file they are entitled to,” she said.

But technology is not a silver bullet to the problems of inefficiency, said Berry. “Paperwork is not the sole cause of bureaucracy,” she said. “The problem is deeper rooted than that ­ – it’s in the systems and processes that have been established for people to follow.”

The situation is improving. A programme known as the Information Systems Improvement Strategy aims to connect police forces’ IT systems. The Police National Database in 2010 will provide more joined-up intelligence. Handheld devices for police officers will give faster access to information on people they arrest (see below). And Nomis will improve the movement of information on convicted offenders.

But progress is slow and the problem is siloed thinking as well as siloed technology, according to one CIO involved in the justice system: “It isn’t one central IT system we need, it’s people thinking: ‘I know something that might benefit others who are dealing with this person further down the line’. There needs to be an appetite to share better information in better ways.”

Mobile devices are a boon on the beat

As of April this year, the 43 police forces in England and Wales had deployed 26,188 mobile PDAs to frontline officers, with a final target of 30,000 due to be completed by March next year.

One such force, Thames Valley Police, has issued 1,200 mobile devices to officers, with another 800 due by the end of this month. Some 80 per cent of frontline officers say they like the devices and they have made the working day easier. The main benefit cited has been an ability to find out who someone is and whether they represent a danger, while officers are still out on the street, according to Keigh Gough, project manager for the implementation.

“That’s a priority and the devices can provide photos from the warrants database, which can be checked against people’s faces to tell if they are who they say they are,” he said.