Inside Iowa’s data solutions looking to reduce recidivism and improve prison management
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Timely data insights are helping Iowa’s Department of Corrections target facilities that need extra support to manage and release incarcerated individuals successfully.
In Iowa, the state’s Department of Corrections has reported its lowest recidivism rate in a decade, and some officials say the agency’s enhanced data analytics in recent years has helped achieve that goal.
Recidivism is defined as the return of an individual to an Iowa prison within three years following a previous term of incarceration.
The state’s recidivism rate reached 32.8% for the fiscal year 2022 to 2025 cohort, representing a 3% decline since 2024, officials announced last month. Since 2019, the recidivism rate has declined by 6.1 percentage points.
“We really focus on recidivism and … a big push that we have going on right now is prison management,” said Paul Cornelius, chief of staff at the Iowa Department of Corrections. Currently the department oversees 8,487 people in prison and 41,221 people in community-based corrections, such as probation and parole.
Over the last five years, the DOC has worked with analytics provider SAS to modernize and enhance the agency’s data analysis capabilities and help officials more effectively manage and move people through the carceral system, he said.
SAS has helped the DOC leverage data solutions to inform efforts to release people from incarceration and predict potentially dangerous behavior among currently incarcerated individuals, but the organizations’ work began with medical management.
The DOC first adopted SAS during the pandemic, in response to the department’s need for an improved data management system to update incarcerated individuals’ medical information during the COVID-19 outbreak, said Sarah Fineran, research director at the Iowa Department of Corrections.
The first project between DOC and SAS was the development of a medical management dashboard, which automated the tracking and monitoring of data like COVID-19 cases and vaccinations, Fineran said.
“All of the manual data entry that had once overwhelmed our already overwhelmed workforce was now automated, and it introduced this degree of agility that we hadn't had before,” to more effectively allocate resources, services and personnel, she explained. The dashboard still helps DOC manage, track and analyze communicable disease trends among the incarcerated population.
Following the medical dashboard’s success, DOC launched a dashboard that aims to help officials identify ideal candidates for release from prison, Fineran said. The dashboard includes data points like a person’s recent incidents with prison staff or other incarcerated individuals, the length of their sentence and the type of offense to generate a risk score, she explained.
“We have the ability to just really be more dynamic in the services that we offer and better manage our operations,” Fineran said. “What used to be a process of days for our staff to identify people that they would recommend to our courtroom for release now can take a matter of minutes [and] just a matter of clicks.”
The DOC also leverages a predictive data tool that uses an algorithm to alert officials of incarcerated individuals who may be at a higher risk of being violent toward staff or other incarcerated people, Fineran said. The tool helps DOC staff proactively plan to manage the person’s behavior through interventions, like ensuring they maintain contact with their family or keep up with any medications, if necessary.
Broadly speaking, the dashboards enable officials to more effectively determine factors impacting the prison intake and release rates and allocate appropriate funding and resources to address them, she said. For instance, data may show that an individual has been serving a longer sentence than what’s necessary or identify a facility that has been historically under resourced, creating over capacity issues.
“That's what we want to do in corrections, we want to focus on high-risk, high-needs individuals and deploy a higher degree of support to those people, which in turn helps support them as clients and help support our staff as well to create safer environments,” Fineran said.