This copy was commissioned by Transmedia for their Prison Management Software for the DRC.
About Transmedia
We are an acclaimed London based development consultancy, fixated on delivering excellence in the international market for our clients. Administering comprehensive consultation is central to us, which is driven by in-depth knowledge and market leading insights from our experienced team.
Transmedia is impassioned by delivering solutions for digital transformation and efficiency for prisoner management in Africa and other developing nations. We strongly believe that through data analysis, the impact that prisoner management has on the criminal justice system can be positively transformed, and to a greater extent, prisoner rehabilitation completely revolutionised.
Our prisoner management software solution is trusted by 13 prisons across Kenya, Somalia and the Seychelles, with the aim to support the prison industry and justice system across Africa and neighbouring nations.
About Prisoner Management Software
Managing a prison is no simple task. There are many factors that are under consideration: crime committed, sentence length, prisoner health, prisoner behavioural records, religious requirements, and much more. How are your prisons currently tracking all of this information? How do you know exactly how much is left on a prisoner’s sentence? How are you guaranteeing the safety of the public by ensuring the most dangerous convicts stay within your prison walls? Are you still using paper records or outdated systems that are vulnerable to corruption or theft? Are your prisons thoroughly recording COVID-19 infections and deaths?
The administrative aspect of prisoner management can be a nightmare, but Transmedia’s Prisoner Management Software Application makes this efficient and easy to use. Imagine a world where in a few clicks, your officers can easily generate a list of prisoners based on severity of committed offence, length of sentence, danger level, age, health status, gang affiliation, and even repeat offenders. Envisage how much this can help the justice system on the whole, and especially with fighting organised crime or serial criminals. This will be monumental support for ongoing and future investigations and cases, and could prove uplifting for society as a whole.
With the global pandemic and the health of your prisoners pendulous, what if your officers were able to separate the more vulnerable prisoners from the general prison community, reducing their probability of infection. As prison managers, it is your responsibility to maintain safety on all levels for your prisoners and having prompt access to information that you need on your prison population is key to preserving the highest level of safety and security for both your prisoners and your officers.
Features of Prisoner Management Software
Prisoner record management and tracking is key to running a prison smoothly. Without having access to accurate information, your officers are left operating blindly, potentially risking their personal safety and the safety of the prison population. Should a prisoner have an existing record for violence or smuggling, but the current system has no record of it or only shows a partial record with missing information, that prisoner could be a danger to himself or others and can compromise the entire management of the operation. To overcome this issue and increase the security of your prison, you require a system that is comprehensive enough to cover the major areas of prisoner tracking, while keeping those records accessible even during outages. By having the important information at hand, your officers will be in a much stronger position to manage troublesome prisoners and keep the peace.
Prisoner Registration and Sentencing
Transmedia’s Prisoner Management Software allows your officers to easily create a new registration from a warrant card, while allowing them to run searches on names and check for existing case numbers and prisoner records before creating a new one, reducing duplication and ensuring that your prisoner records are accurate and comprehensive. After a new record has been created, your officers can then begin allocating offences, counts for each offence and whether the overall sentence is to run concurrently or consecutively with any existing sentence from other convictions, allowing your officers to view the total sentence, the duration, and the imprisonment period. This is the foundation of ensuring that your prison is kept running efficiently and effectively and removes the guesswork and manual calculation altogether.
Prisoner Management
In a few clicks your officers can view a single digital file and timeline of an individual prisoner, including all personal information, details input by officers, and any scans, reports of documents uploaded and saved to their file, and print a single summary sheet for an individual prisoner, or print summaries for a selected group. Your officers can even print prisoner ID cards. With Transmedia’s prisoner management system, your officers will be able to view a detailed history of all incarcerations for each prisoner, all transfers between prisons and the current location, any upcoming court cases and upcoming releases.
Being able to classify prisoners according to the challenge or danger level they present as a prisoner is an important part of prison safety, and our software gives your officers the ability to generate a report based on this, allowing them to better mix prisoners into groups for activities. This information, along with their medical and behavioural traits at the time of transport and transfer, can be easily added to their files, making them more comprehensive, giving your officers a better understanding of each prisoner and how to manage them. Details such as current age and age on conviction, next of kin contact details, prisoner property, and medical record can be added in upon creation of their prisoner file.
During their stay at your prison, your officers can add in more detail, providing a clearer picture of your prisoners on an individual level. Disciplinary offences along with respective paperwork, prisoner associate network, all incoming and outgoing commutation, and movement and personnel files can be added to the prisoner records. Security incident reports, including their name, accomplices, type and details of incident and follow up actions can be added to the prisoner files, with an option to easily print or email these reports. As a part of a much larger network, your officers will also be able to generate a report of prisoners flagged as terror suspects, aiding your anti-terrorism network and supporting the justice system.
Rehabilitation plays a large part in prison life, so naturally, our software includes the option for your officers to submit all skills courses they completed with their level of achievement. This allows you to generate a report of their progress when it’s time to evaluate their imprisonment status.
Multiple Language Support
Language barriers can be difficult, but with the built-in language support, your entire team can benefit from an effective software without the obstacle of language. Any language is supported, once the translations are provided, and the system uses one maintenance screen to work through references to different tables and layouts, allowing translations for the screens, fields, labels, tabs and buttons. Your entire team now as the peace of mind to use the software in their native language, unlike any other system available.
Notifications
Notifications help us keep on top of our daily lives. By using this familiar technique on your prisoner management system, your officers will be notified automatically of any court appearances or prisoners due for release the following day, keeping your officers more efficient and aware.
Visitor Screen
To effectively keep track of your prisoner communication, visitors will need to be recorded. This screen allows your officers to see the contact details of each visitor, the names of all the prisoners visited by an individual visitor, a full history of all visits, and facilities to record photographs and ID documents of all visitors.
Biometric Authentication
Visitors can identify themselves using accepted documents and their fingerprints are recorded for future identification, creating a fast-track system for visitors with registered fingerprints. This biometric fingerprint authentication can also apply to officers as a form of system login.
Cases Screen
Easily view upcoming prisoner releases and appeals, and search cases by district, date, case number, prisoner name, primary offence and more. Your officers can even view the prisoners entering incarceration based on their offences or case number. This allows a much more effective way of tracking cases.
Crime Analysis Screen
Searching prisoner case records by day, offence, sentence, name, demographic and behavioural traits allows your officers to better analyse the prisoners. This screen also allows officers to view the number of prisoners held under remand and custodial sentence, per offence and time period.
Officer Screen
This screen gives access to personal details and system activity for each officer, giving the system administrator a clear understanding of which officer is using the system and how. It also gives the option to allocate roles and privileges through profiles allowing for more security over prisoner information. A master profile table controls the system privileges granted, and roles are assigned to these profiles, with officers being assigned roles. Officers will only see the information and menu items that are necessary for their role, rank and profile.
Audit Trail
This audit trail stores a record of every change made in prisoner and case files, and records the date, time, user, old value and new value. Audit trail can be searched in the event that a change needs to be reversed.
Security Records Maintenance
This screen allows your officers to record and search each case of a security incident by date, category, location and status, and link SIRs to detect and predict incident patterns. A security report can be generated into PDF form or printed.
Record and View standard Data
You can view lists of districts, courts, tribes, nationalities, and recognised offences.