The Providence Plan is currently developing a mapping application designed to help corrections, public safety and social service agencies better supervise and assist returning prisoners. One goal of this statewide project is to produce a tool that can be easily replicated – at very little cost – in communities across the country.

ProvPlan and The Urban Institute in Washington D.C. received funding from the National Institute of Justice to develop, evaluate and disseminate this tool. ProvPlan has partnered with The Urban Institute on numerous projects in the past, including the Institute’s Prisoner Reentry Mapping Network and the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership.

This project relies on widely used open-source software to produce maps identifying the up-to-date locations of recently released prisoners and related support services. As a Web-based application with a familiar architecture (Google Maps), this password-protected tool will bring state-of-the-art mapping technology to users operating anything from a desktop computer to a small handheld...

...“Rhode Island is a good place to pioneer this application because nearly all of our released prisoners come from the Adult Correctional Institution,” says Jim Lucht, who is heading up the project for ProvPlan. “But it could prove even more useful in states with many levels of jurisdiction because it will centralize all the information.”