Sealing the Cracks Pennsylvania's criminal justice agencies and courts are evolving into one integrated law enterprise and eliminating blind spots that criminals use to beat the system. Everybody's got a system, and, left alone, they'll get the job done, eventually.
Trouble is, nobody's left alone in a wired world.
In the predigital past, far-flung agencies carved out their territories in relative isolation, devising internal systems that worked behind concrete walls and having little contact with other agencies whose work was tangential. Then came the realization that information can go anywhere, followed shortly by the expectation that information should go everywhere. They're talking in Pennsylvania. Most particularly, they're talking in the arenas of public safety and criminal justice, the fields in which the stakes are highest, where customer satisfaction can literally be a matter of life and death. The facilitator of criminal justice dialogue in Pennsylvania is the Justice Network, JNET, a fast-growing project that is pulling together the data of 10 key agencies and sealing up the cracks through which criminals sometimes escape the system.