After all the delays, after the legal fights and technological obstacles, we were finally ready to proceed with the stories we'd planned to do all along. Months earlier, the Star Tribune had requested jail booking records from Minnesota's 87 counties and probation records from the seven largest counties in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. We wanted to quantify the anecdotes we'd heard for years: Offenders on probation were repeatedly committing new crimes without receiving the threatened sentence from their previous convictions.
The stories went beyond data analysis to find real offenders and real victims. It also helped elicit real change.
The original idea was to build a database of the Twin Cities offenders on probation over the past five years, link it to another database of all offenders booked into jail over the same period to find the people who committed new offenses while on probation for old ones.
From the beginning, however, there were problems.
No statewide database
Minnesota has no statewide criminal justice system database. Each county not only keeps its booking and probation records in different formats and in different systems, there are no unique identifiers to ensure that one John Smith isn't another John Smith. Those differences not only made it difficult for counties to share records with other counties, it made it nearly impossible for one county's probation agency to share data with the same county's sheriff's department.
OK. We'd create our own way to link the databases. Converting first name, middle name, last name and date of birth into a character string, we could create keyfields that would allow us to pull a thread through nearly 100 different databases of offenders.
One problem: The state's largest sheriff's department and several of the largest probation agencies insisted that the dates of birth of offenders were not public. Without those dates, how could we be certain that we were indeed finding the same offenders with multiple records in multiple counties? We filed several lawsuits.
We had dates of birth from all the counties but Hennepin, the state's largest. Using data sets from the state Sentencing Guidelines Commission, state Supreme Court information system and other counties, we found birth dates for more than 28,000 of the 89,000 people booked in Hennepin County from 1994 through 1998. More importantly, we tracked down the dates of birth for the county's 1,200 most frequent offenders.
The result of our work was the July 1999 publication of "Catch & Release Justice," a series of stories that showed how thousands of chronic offenders continue to cycle through jails over and over again with little serious consequence. The series also chronicled the pain and damage they cause by repeatedly creating new victims. But we weren't finished yet.
Dates of birth
The lawsuits still were out there. And soon after publication, Star Tribune editor Tim McGuire took local officials to task in a column for withholding offenders' dates of birth. A week later, the newspaper reached settlement agreements with probation and sheriffs' officials and we finally began receiving the dates of birth.
McGuire urged us to write the stories that we had originally proposed - find the repeat offenders on probation at the time they committed new crimes. We moved forward.
Again, we faced problems. Ramsey County was unable to provide offenders' conditions of probation in a computerized format, making impossible a cross-county analysis of how well criminals complied with those conditions. And Hennepin County, which supervises about 30 percent of the state's probationers, provided incomplete data. The probation department gave us data on 64,461 cases over five years but most were missing dates on which the probation was to end. They also seemed not to know how many people were actually given probation. When we turned to the Hennepin County District Court, which provided us with data on all sentenced offenders over the same five years, we found that there were really 102,000 probation cases. When we asked probation officials about this, they simply instructed us to "go with the higher number."
Using nearly 220,000 records, CAR Editor Dan Browning tracked overlapping probations - offenders sentenced and given new probation while still on the books for an older offense. We also examined whether officials knew when the offenders they supervised were booked into jail on suspicion of committing new crimes.
Results
The stories went beyond data analysis to find real offenders and real victims. It also helped elicit real change. State lawmakers earlier this year approved development of a new statewide criminal history information system - signed into law by Gov. Jesse Ventura - that will eventually allow officials across the state to know when offenders are booked, charged and sentenced anywhere in Minnesota. In addition, the series sparked action by the state's business community. By lending their expertise and financial muscle, business leaders are helping speed the development of a statewide database of all offenders placed on probation. Two counties - Hennepin and Anoka - now download the names, offense information and conditions of all offenders with probation into a state computer system each night. Other counties will be added over the next couple years. Charlie Weaver, Minnesota's commissioner of public safety, has credited the newspaper for providing the spark to change what had been a critical - but largely invisible - problem. "Everyone is responsible for how we got to this place. And the offenders know how to play the system," Weaver said. "If there aren't consequences for the repeat offenders, they're going to continue to reoffend."
James Walsh can be reached by e-mail at jwalsh@startribune.com