Cherokee Sheriff’s Office: Integrated jail management for data-driven decisions

“With the same person, there could be 23 different entries, and I could never get the full picture of the who, what, where, and when without going into 23 different cases and reading every report. Peregrine's ability to merge entities and provide a quick, holistic view is huge for us.”

Lindsay Harris, Intelligence Division Commander, Cherokee Sheriff's Office

Cherokee Sheriff's Office

• The Cherokee Sheriff’s Office (CSO) once managed information across a variety of siloed systems, full of similar records.
• The agency also lacked efficient access to data from partner organizations, including the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC). This slowed down analysis and investigations.
• Peregrine integrated, harmonized, and enhanced data from the CSO, GDC, and other partner agencies, unifying it on a collective platform and empowering CSO personnel to make more informed decisions.
• Peregrine also merged similar records stored across the CSO’s and GDC’s data systems, so a search against all integrated sources returns clean, deduplicated results.

CHEROKEE COUNTY, Ga. — Before investing in data integration technology, Cherokee County’s corrections personnel struggled to draw connections and gain a holistic operating picture from disjointed data spread across siloed systems.

If a deputy wanted to look up an inmate’s interactions with the state corrections system, they had to look up the offender on the GDC’s website to find information such as their mugshot, incarceration history, physical descriptors, and aliases — all of which lived separately from the county’s jail data. The CSO didn’t have a way to view and analyze all relevant data at once to fully understand an inmate’s profile and history.

Peregrine flipped the script by joining data from the CSO’s disparate sources; ingesting information from the GDC; cleaning and harmonizing all of that integrated data; and providing valuable, actionable insights for CSO personnel. Keep reading to learn how data integration is driving more efficient jail management workflows in Cherokee County and beyond.

Integrating state and county data for deeper insights

"The amount of time Peregrine saved me by connecting the individuals and providing a photo from an outside agency is invaluable." —Lindsay Harris, Intelligence Division Commander, Cherokee Sheriff's Office

Working closely with GDC, Peregrine ingested state-level corrections data and integrated it with the CSO’s records management system (RMS), jail management system (JMS), and jail visitation system, plus data from participating partner agencies, such as the Cartersville Police Department and MARTA Police Department. This allowed CSO personnel to securely access GDC data, in bulk, and search against all integrated sources on a single unified platform — no more scrolling through mugshots on GDC’s website.

CSO Intelligence Division Commander Lindsay Harris explained how Peregrine helped her identify an individual who gave false contact information when they signed in to visit a Cherokee County Jail inmate. In that scenario, Harris only had two real pieces of information to work with: the visitor’s provided home address, which wasn’t associated with the visitor but was a valid address, and footage from the video visit.

Harris searched the address in Peregrine, which revealed the individuals associated with that residence and those individuals’ known connections. Though the visitor was not directly associated with the address, they were connected to someone who was, so Harris’ search returned the visitor as a known connection — including their GDC mugshot.

"I was able to affirmatively identify the individual simply by glancing at a photo within a large list of possible associates in Peregrine," Harris said. "Without having a name, establishing this connection and matching it to a picture in a separate database would have been nearly impossible to accomplish."

By integrating state corrections data, Peregrine enabled Harris to identify the visitor in a matter of minutes. Otherwise, she said, she may have never been able to do it.

"The amount of time Peregrine saved me by connecting the individuals and providing a photo from an outside agency is invaluable,” Harris said.

Record deduplication across systems

Peregrine uses a proprietary algorithm called Match to deduplicate person records across all integrated data sources in Peregrine and create a single, merged record for each individual who appears in those sources.

For the CSO, Match merges person records across all integrated GDC and CSO data systems. This allows CSO personnel to search against multiple data sources simultaneously in Peregrine and find clean, organized results, without having to piece together similar person records from various information systems.

Let’s use the hypothetical John Doe as an example:

• CSO RMS: John Doe entered the CSO's RMS in 2021 when he was arrested for shoplifting.
• CSO JMS: John entered the CSO’s JMS when he spent the night in the Cherokee County Jail following his 2021 arrest.
• GDC offender database: In 2023, John was arrested again for shoplifting. This time, he was incarcerated in a state prison. He entered the GDC’s offender database as Jon Doe, using an alternative spelling of his first name.

That’s three different person records in three different systems, filed under two different names — all for the same individual.

Peregrine Match would identify those duplicative entities and create one collective John Doe record compiling information from the CSO’s RMS, the CSO’s JMS, and the GDC’s offender database. Match would also flag his record as “merged” and provide the source information for all data included, making it faster and easier for CSO personnel to gain a full picture of John Doe.

Harris said Match has been particularly helpful for the agency’s legacy RMS, which was riddled with duplicate person records.

“With the same person, there could be 23 different entries, and I could never get the full picture of the who, what, where, and when without going into 23 different cases and reading every report,” Harris said. “Peregrine's ability to merge entities and provide a quick, holistic view is huge for us.”

Actionable insights from JMS data

With access to the right data from the right sources, the CSO can better leverage its jail data to identify visitors, make informed decisions about inmate housing, and aid in investigations to keep county jails and neighborhoods safer.

Data-informed inmate housing

Harris said she uses jail booking information in Peregrine to more accurately identify gang-affiliated inmates. She built out jail administration dashboards in Peregrine to illustrate where current gang-affiliated inmates are housed, improving situational awareness and informing housing decisions for jail personnel.

“I created charts showing gang affiliation by housing unit and security classification so jail staff could quickly make informed decisions. In one pane of glass, deputies can see that there is a Sureño, an Outlaw, and a Ghostface Gangster all in M Pod. Is this something we need to be concerned about?” Harris said. “They never had the ability to see that before.”

Identifying potential threats

Before Peregrine, CSO users couldn’t search their jail visitor database by phone number, email, or address, even though all visitors must provide that information to enter the jail. Now, users can seamlessly access jail visitation data alongside the agency’s other data sources.

Harris said the enhanced search capabilities make it easier to identify gang-affiliated individuals and even houses. With one search, she said, she could use Peregrine to find every inmate associated with the Ghostface Gangsters who had a visitor from a particular area.

In another example, Harris noticed that four different people visiting four different inmates all gave the same home address. She could also see that each inmate was associated with the same gang. This indicated that the visitors’ residence might be a gang-affiliated house.

Integrated corrections with Peregrine

The CSO leverages Peregrine’s data integration technology to streamline its jail management workflows, from identifying visitors to building more complete inmate profiles using data from multiple sources and agencies. By unifying the agency’s most important data on one intuitive platform, Peregrine has empowered CSO personnel to better flag problems, identify trends, and implement solutions in their correctional facility and beyond.

Contact our team to learn more about how data integration could benefit your agency.