The WIJIS (Wisconsin Justice Information Sharing) Program supports OJA’s mission of Building Safer Communities by helping to deliver to law enforcement officers, prosecutors and other criminal justice professionals the information they need to make timely, accurate and fair decisions. Specifically, WIJIS exists to improve the flow of information across community and organizational boundaries and between computerized systems. WIJIS does so by building partnerships among stakeholders in the criminal justice system and harnessing technology to improve justice system processes.
All of these activities are aimed at arming all criminal justice system decision-makers with more information, better information, and information that is timely and directly focused on the decision at hand.
In the end, it's all about decision making.
WIJIS seeks to improve decision-making in three key ways:
1. Improving the effectiveness of decisions. Good decision-making is informed by reliable, timely information. When decision makers share information across boundaries, they all have a better sense of the big picture and make fairer, more effective decisions. The WIJIS Justice Gateway and other agencies’ information-sharing initiatives focus on informing decision-makers.
2. Improving the efficiency of decision-making. The criminal justice process is often characterized by the flow of paper between justice agencies (arrest reports, charging documents, sentencing orders, warrants, conditions of probation and parole, to name only a few). Wisconsin’s criminal justice community has made significant strides in computerizing this workflow, eliminating expensive and time-consuming re-keying of data. Click here for a summary of projects that WIJIS and other agencies are leading.
3. Making the Strategic Decisions: The Technology Behind Answering the Question: “What Works?” No matter how well we can inform the officers, judges and others who make individual decisions every day, if analysts and researcher aren’t armed with strong aggregate data, then we are driving through the rear view mirror. As WIJIS initiatives and standards evolve, it is imperative to build solutions that meet the needs of the analysts, researchers and evaluators who determine what actually works. OJA's Statistical Analysis Center provides a wide range of statistical analysis tools to criminal justice decision-makers across the state and nation. Adapting Wisconsin’s information-sharing infrastructure to better support these needs is on WIJIS’ future agenda.
QUICK LINKS
Apply for a WIJIS Justice Gateway Implementation Grant
Join JISP, the Justice Information Sharing Professionals
View a map of the current Justice Gateway rollout status
View the online WIJIS Justice Gateway training
See what's new on the national front in Justice Information Sharing 
