LEAA

The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) was a federal agency created by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It provided grants for programs to further law enforcement and judicial assistance across the United States, disbursing hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local criminal justice agencies, research organizations, and technology projects over its operational life.¹

PROMIS and INSLAW Funding

LEAA funded the original PROMIS software development, beginning with an exploratory grant to the DC U.S. Attorney's Office in 1969 to create a case management system. After PROMIS was declared an "exemplary project," LEAA invested heavily in expanding the system, funding INSLAW (the Institute for Law and Social Research) for enhancements and providing transfer grants to municipalities adopting the software. At peak, LEAA grants accounted for up to 80 percent of INSLAW's operating income. In August 1971, LEAA Administrator Jerris Leonard wrote to approximately 1,300 prosecutors nationwide encouraging adoption of PROMIS-style systems.¹

Charles R. Work — who had served as a co-director of the original PROMIS development project alongside Joan E. Jacoby and Bill Hamilton — later became a senior LEAA official and promoted PROMIS adoption through both the National Center for Prosecution Management and direct grants to INSLAW and adopting municipalities.¹

LEAA also funded the PROMIS Research Project, a multi-year empirical criminal justice research initiative through three successive grants (74-NI-99-0008, 75-NI-99-0111, 76-NI-99-0118) that produced 17 published research reports analyzing approximately 100,000 cases processed through the District of Columbia court system.²

Reorganization and Abolition

By the late 1970s, Congress had begun reassessing LEAA's effectiveness and cost. The Justice System Improvement Act of 1979 (Public Law 96-157) restructured LEAA's functions and created successor entities. LEAA was formally abolished and its programs were transferred to the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), all under the Department of Justice, in 1982.¹

The loss of LEAA funding created a crisis for INSLAW. Without the grants that had sustained the company's operations, Bill Hamilton incorporated INSLAW as a for-profit Delaware corporation in January 1981 and sought to commercialize PROMIS. The company's search for replacement revenue led directly to the March 1982 implementation contract with the DOJ's Executive Office for United States Attorneys — the contract whose execution became the central dispute in the PROMIS Software Scandal.²