Operational & Economic Benefits of Adopting
a Custom Jail Management Software

1. Why Your Jail Management System Is Failing

There's probably more than one reason, but let's focus on the operations side. An unfathomable number of moving parts are coming together when trying to sustain a prison population with a frenetic ebb and flow of departures and arrivals.

We have inmates that need to be checked in and inmates that need to be checked out. We have cell assessments to adjust, and inventory to scale. After according to the latest reports of Statista.com, the average state prison houses over 650,000 inmates each day in local jails in the United States during 2020. Making sure the basic needs are met for a population of that size is an arduous undertaking, and keeping peace among a group predisposed to crime requires constant intervention.

If we can forge an integrated information management system where all of those needs are met through intuitive data aggregation, where orders are automatically scaled and fulfilled according to the prison population, and inmate profiles are easily generated and archived we can greatly reduce a highly inflated bottom line.

Your current means of jail management is failing because your legacy system does not support interoperability. We must bring all the moving parts under a singular set of software services, opening them up to one another and facilitating cross-channel communication. You need real-time access, where records are accessible immediately so that after an arrest, the inmate's record is shared with the corresponding jail/prison so that the records are now available for any authorized correctional officer.

By eliminating information management silos, correctional facilities gain a holistic, automated view of the prospective facility where all changes are transparent and articulated immediately.

With a more holistic view, we can more easily pinpoint inefficiencies and money pits, pivoting accordingly to reduce that bottom line.

2. The Cloud: Let’s Lock Up Our Data in a Place It Can’t Escape

Let’s be honest—there’s a lot of liability wrapped up in Corrections, and corrections facilities spend a lot of time and money wrapped up in civil litigation. According to a study on inmate litigation, an average of 27 out of every 1000 inmates pursue some sort of legal action against the prison system they were incarcerated within. The primary topics for these lawsuits include medical care issues, disciplinary procedures, religious suppression, and infringement on inmate privileges (visiting, mail, phone, etc.).

No matter the topic of litigation, there is one thing that could discredit any evidence against a corrections facility, complete and total transparency. The best way to accomplish total transparency is by being forthcoming and robust with on-site data collection, which most commonly manifests in the form of video surveillance. Most correctional facilities have these faculties by now, this isn't some cutting-edge concept, however, if the video is low-quality, black and white, and analog, what purpose does it really serve?

The most incapacitating part of the current video surveillance architecture is the way it's being stored. At some point, prisons max out their storage bandwidth trying to log a constant video stream for later access. When they max out their bandwidth, curated data must be deleted to make room for new data. In deleting archives, the facility becomes vulnerable to lawsuits.

If we were to transition all video surveillance and all other data of that matter, to a cloud-based system we eliminate all retrieval errors and solidify archives. The cloud server will also support the new wave of surveillance technologies sweeping the corrections landscape. Some of these technologies include:

• Suspicious activity identification and subsequent notification

• Heat mapping

• Desktop to mobile streaming

• Facial recognition

• Body cameras for guards

These technologies require intelligent data management capabilities only supported by cloud-based systems. No on-site server can accommodate the storage space modern video streaming demands.

The cloud can be accessed from anywhere with internet connectivity, as the data is stored on a remote server. Storing remotely reduced the opportunity for tampering since the data is completely transparent to every individual with access. Being a gatekeeper for digital evidence comes with a set of responsibilities outlined by the Criminal Justice Information Service and the Federal Information Processing Standards. Mishandling the information through falsified video records is less of a concern when the data is stored on a singular, collaborative platform.

If we increase bandwidth, we can increase the intelligence of our video surveillance systems, reducing the number of lawsuits lost to a lack of digital evidence.

3. Recidivism? What about Correctional Staff Retention?

Although prisons may be overpopulated, there’s a larger problem at play that leaves the entire system open to a slew of vulnerabilities: understaffed facilitates. Correctional facilities are facing difficulties in both the hiring and recruiting process, and for the most part, it’s cyclic--potential hires shy away from opportunities because of the current Corrections climate, and current employees find themselves in an overpopulated/understaffed environment they are eager to leave.

Hiring more individuals would produce a more palatable inmate-to-guard ratio, making correctional recruiting a more desirable commodity and the current employees would be less likely to seek alternative employment.

To streamline the recruitment and retention process, correctional facilities can invest in tracking software that unifies the recruiting and employee reporting modules, forging greater accessibility for all entities (supervisors, officers, new hires, etc.). We’re hitting both pain points here—standardizing recruitment and automating personnel data management to reduce turnover.

There is intensive training required for each new hire, a series of classroom-based learning sessions, combined with defensive and tactical training that closely mirror police cadet onboarding. Here, recruits become highly attune to potential dangers and how to circumvent adversity and violence. Inevitably, prisons are high-risk, the ability to reduce risk through proper training is paramount to a correctional climate for the sake of the employees and the other inmates as well. Employee tracking software can be programmed with the principles, concepts, and procedures inherent to an effective training program, ensuring that all new recruits undergo the same process and are held to the same standards.

We can track how much time has passed since the instruction to implement refresher courses to maintain a level of consistency among the workforce. These alerts can tell us who needs firearms training, which CPR/First Aid certifications have expired, and when the facility is due for a restraint technique class. Continued education is always a sore subject in corrections, but if the units are accessible through employee portals, the onus falls on the individual to fulfill their learning requirements.

Rather than relying on manual scheduling, an Excel-generated report taped to the back of the break room door, Corrections employee tracking software generates individual schedules for all the employees that they can tap into from any device, trading shifts, requesting time off, and making other adjustments directly from their mobile device. Supervisors allocate shifts through an easy-to-use scheduling portal that notifies them when requests are made and distributes their approval to the corresponding team member.

There are a plethora of alerts we can set for different circumstances—emergencies, reaching overtime, shift change, lockdowns, and whatever other actionable items rely on an outdated alert system.