New Jersey Courts drives innovation for modern criminal justice

It takes agility to go from legacy system to innovation powerhouse. New Jersey Courts became a trailblazer for smart government by connecting and automating the criminal justice process from law enforcement to the courtroom.

In this video, Jack McCarthy, CIO, State of New Jersey – Judiciary, discusses how the New Jersey Courts team is providing innovation to the courts, allowing them to think and do things differently as major criminal justice reform moved forward.

Transcript:

So back in June of 2020, we have our major criminal justice reform project, it's underway, it's moving forward. We were a heavily paper-driven system where individual get would get arrested, and there may not be a true prosecutor review for a month because the paperwork had to get collected, moved to their office, brought in into the system. Now prosecutors are doing that within seconds of the arrest. As soon as the police officer hits enter, we're able to take all that data and move it to all the key stakeholders, public defenders, prosecutors, the jail, our pretrial services unit, and everybody can start working on it and then grabbing more data that they need in the system, not taking days or weeks. That's gone. It's, we're down to seconds now. We knew that the changes they were requesting on our Java world might take three months, but in the Pega world, we were able to hear about it Tuesday and have it done on Friday. And so it was the enhancements to the system, tweaking business rules and those changes brought us down to about a five or 10% development time versus what it was had we been doing it in our older technologies. Every individual in New Jersey, you're arrested, you have 48 hours to hit your initial first appearance in front of the judge. We couldn't do that if it wasn't for the system that we have now. What we've been able to do is remove IT as the bottleneck to projects. We have a partner in Pega that are up there providing innovation to the courts and allowing them to think and do things that probably weren't possible in the past.