Ventura County Probation Kiosks

Ventura County, California. – Aug.29, 2016 – In July 2010, the Ventura County Probation Agency  in California contracted DynaTouch to develop and supply self-reporting check-in kiosks for low risk offenders, featuring multi-factor authentication via a client-specific PIN and a biometric fingerprint reader.

The Ventura County Probation website  states, “The Ventura County Probation Agency is charged by the courts with the direct supervision of approximately 15,500 adult offenders and 2,500 juvenile offenders on probation… to accomplish this mission, a highly-trained corps of armed deputy probation officers supervise the most serious offenders via close community monitoring, including GPS tracking and frequent field contacts” (venturaprobation.org, 2016). Meanwhile, low risk offender field visits are facilitated, in part, by the Ventura County Probation KIOSK program.

“The KIOSK is an alternative means of supervising low risk offenders identified through evidenced-based practices and risk assessments…offenders assigned to use the KIOSK are required to report to the KIOSK on a monthly basis.  A KIOSK is located in probation offices in the cities of Simi Valley, Oxnard, Camarillo, and Ventura, for convenient reporting in the community in which offenders live and/or work” (venturaprobation.org, 2016).

DynaTouch worked closely with Ventura County’s Application Development team, to develop a multi-lingual solution that allowed clients to confirm or update their personal data (address, contact info, employment status, etc.), then answer a series of questions about what they had/hadn’t done since their last visit. Their answers are run against back-end business logic to verify user identity, raise alerts, and broadcast general population and user-specific messages from the department. At the end of the session a printed receipt is presented to the user for verification of the probation visit. The kiosks interface with the existing VCIJIS system via secure web services. To assure privacy and security, the self-reporting application was built on top of DynaTouch’s government-approved lockdown browser software platform known as TIPS™.  The kiosks serve over 21,000 clients a year.

DynaTouch CEO, Terri McClelland, said, “Ventura County’s use of the TIPS Probation Check-In Kiosk is a logical, forward-facing innovation in the ever-evolving field of corrections. DynaTouch applauds their vision and focus on how to get the job done in the most efficient and effective way.”