The National Offender Management Service (Noms) has implemented text analysis software to help cut reoffending rates among prisoners and people on probation.
Noms plans to use vendor SPSS’s Clementine tool to analyse more than 400,000 reports stored in its offender management system OASys.

Philip Howard, senior research officer at Noms, says Clementine can help the organisation develop more effective policies to tackle criminality.

‘We’ll be able to provide broad statistical data predicting how many offenders are suitable for the different types of interventions that can be made,’ he said.

Howard says the free-text analysis functions of the system will also allow Noms to make improvements to the OASys system itself, which is used by probation officers across the UK to record offenders’ data and case histories.

‘We can analyse what probation officers are entering into comment boxes. If there are recurring themes we may amend the questions and check boxes in OASys to reflect them. And by analysing data on reconviction rates, we can see if refinements can be made to the scoring system,’ he said.

‘The key benefit for us has been the ability to create programs by putting together flowcharts on-screen, rather than having to write thousands of lines of code. My department is made up of social scientists, not IT people. Previously, only one of us could write programs; with Clementine, the whole department can.’

The system was put in place four months ago, and Howard admits that Noms is still in the early stages of using it.

‘At the moment we’re providing the same kind of information to the organisation that we were before, only quicker. We haven’t used the free-text function much yet. We’re using the system to build programs for quantitative data analysis,’ he said.

Howard says the organisation is testing a link to the Prison Service’s system, so this data can also be analysed.

Noms announced in August that it plans to implement a £39m system to create a single view of convicted criminals as they move through the UK justice process.