Idaho DOC seeks ongoing funding for Recidiviz case-management tools

Director Josh Tewalt and agency analysts told the Joint Finance Preparations Committee on Feb. 4 that the Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) is seeking ongoing general-fund appropriation to continue and expand its partnership with Recidiviz, a nonprofit that aggregates disparate corrections data to produce dashboards and case-triage tools.

The tools, IDOC said, help probation and parole officers prioritize caseloads and allow supervisors to identify outcome outliers. “It’s probably the most transformative partnership we’ve entered into as an agency in my entire tenure there,” Director Josh Tewalt said, describing Recidiviz as a nonprofit technology partner that “find[s] data across different, outdated systems and bring[s] them together.”

Why it matters: Committee members pressed for evidence the system reduces recidivism or delivers a measurable return on investment before committing ongoing general-fund dollars. Noah Peterson, budget and policy analyst with the Legislative Services Office, told the committee that prior appropriations for Recidiviz were largely one-time funds used to build tools and that the current request would fund continuous development; he did not have hard ROI data during the hearing.

What the agency says: Tewalt said Recidiviz does more than provide software; it builds overlays of existing data and automates back-office tasks that otherwise consume staff time. He described case-triage dashboards that show officers where to prioritize work, and said the prison implementation would let case managers account for actions completed in near real time and feed that data into classification decisions. He added that because Recidiviz is a nonprofit, private philanthropic dollars are matched against each public dollar the state spends.

Lawmakers’ questions and concerns: Senator Cook and Representative Tanner asked for concrete outcome dashboards and comparisons with other vendors. Peterson said he lacked hard outcome numbers at the hearing but offered to obtain them. Representative Tanner asked whether IDOC controls the source data and whether the platform could influence outcomes; Director Tewalt responded that the department controls its data under data-sharing agreements and that Recidiviz pulls data from IDOC systems rather than recreating or manipulating it. Tewalt also said the platform allows benchmarking against other jurisdictions while preserving privacy.

Funding history and next steps: IDOC previously used one-time federal funds and other appropriations—Peterson noted roughly $1.5 million of prior Recidiviz-related appropriations were funded mostly from federal sources—to develop tools used in probation and parole. The agency is asking the committee to fund ongoing development and an extension of that functionality into prisons; staff said they will provide committee members with dashboards and additional documentation on outcomes and philanthropic matches.

Ending: Committee members signaled interest in the potential but requested more data on outcomes, budget implications and vendor comparisons before approving an ongoing general-fund commitment.