Correctional officers are struggling physically, mentally, and emotionally. Inmate populations have returned to their pre-pandemic highs. At the same time, law enforcement resignations have increased 18% and retirements have increased 45%. Recruitment and retention struggles only exasperate these issues. The longstanding physical risks of corrections are as true today as they were fifteen years ago. And 60% of correctional officers blame staffing levels, policies, and poor technology as main drivers of their stress.
Despite all the technology available to correctional officers today, corrections remains a highly dangerous and complex environment. Corrections has one of the highest rates of non-fatal, work-related injuries in the United States. Today’s correctional officers have technology in their living rooms that’s twice as good as what’s in most control rooms. They’re tech savvy and expect relative efficiency. But tight budgets – or an unwillingness to invest in modernizing their teams – force newly minted correctional officers to use old tech, low tech, or bad tech.
Corrections has seen three major technology generational phases over the last 30 years. The first began with jail and offender management systems that enabled agencies to part ways with analog systems. This was the first major modernization effort to perform inmate management. Early systems revolved around mainframe computers for enterprise or large agencies and AS/400 computers for small to medium-sized agencies in the 1980s and early 90s. The earliest jail management systems function almost identically today. They capture and store custody data, housing assignments, charges, court appearances, property, etc.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, guard tour systems proliferated the industry. These types of systems captured security rounds to ensure proof of presence, using a wide range of technology from iButtons to barcodes, and often operated disconnected from jail management systems. But the challenge with guard tour systems is that they principally captured “location-based data.” It verified officer presence but was (and often remains) unable to capture inmate-specific log entries.
The third generational phase took place in the mid 2000s with GUARDIAN RFID introducing the concept of mobile inmate tracking, using RFID tags, ruggedized mobile devices, and Cloud computing – all while integrating with an agency’s jail or offender management system. Active RFID systems, as well as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology systems, known as real-time location systems (RTLS) were also introduced – and remain extremely niche due to cost, complexity, and unproven return on investment.
Over the next decade, correctional officers will achieve a level of constant vigilance and awareness thatwill be unprecedented. This fourth generational phase is built around an AI-First, Cloud-first world.
This next evolutionary phase will also see faster, more pervasive integration with systems that don’t normally work together to create a common operating picture for staff at every level, leveraging AI as a layering technology to see, learn, and predict risks to help correctional officers work ahead. This will enable correctional officers to gain a complete view of challenges that can threaten inmate and staff safety and security, compliance, and accreditation.
An officer experience platform supports teams at every level – from line staff to administration – driving collaboration, insights, focus, and technical advantage. Officer experience boosts productivity and morale by reducing or eliminating inefficiency, maximizing outcomes, and improving safety.
Officer experience platforms visualize team performance standards, identify opportunities for improvement, and pinpoint threats to security, compliance, and liability, in a single pane of glass or common operating picture (COP).
Command Cloud has five native, fully integrated applications: Mobile Command XR, Mission Command, Operational Intelligence, VisionOps, and Med Manager. Command Cloud also has a learning management service, Academy Unlimited. The integration layer of Command Cloud is a REST API known as WolfPack.
The world’s most widely used and trusted mobile inmate tracking system.
Secure, native Cloud platform that delivers a common operating picture and AI-powered insights across every dimension of inmate management.
Visual analytics to identify, diagnose, and precisely manage operational areas of strength and weakness.
A computer vision inmate tracking system to identify and track inmates and officer movements and activity logging.
Create, manage, and administer all prescription and over-the-counter medications at the point of responsibility.
The digital learning platform that helps officers become better officers.
The integration layer of Command Cloud.
From precision coordination of administrative segregation workflows to AI-powered security round automation, inmate tracking, and more, Command Cloud builds on the nearly 20 years of GUARDIAN RFID experience to help officers become better officers.
Real-Time Compliance
Command Cloud introduces the industry’s first patented real-time compliance monitor, providing audible and color-coded alerts to ensure timely observation checks performed at staggered, irregular intervals. This innovative monitoring system reminds staff when checks are due, reducing liability and helping agencies uphold policy standards, as well as documenting late checks.
Enhanced Evidence Gathering
Mobile Command XR offers robust digital evidence gathering capabilities, allowing staff to capture multiple videos and photos at key points of responsibility. These media files are securely stored and searchable, assisting investigations, mental health reviews, and various monitoring needs—while providing unlimited storage space for your digital device.
Improved Observation Performance
Mobile Command XR uses AI to analyze officer behavior patterns. This is because performing staggered, irregular checks is not often practiced, and is critical to keeping your routines unpredictable. Command Cloud has a patented “Staggering Score” feature that uses a purpose-built, supervised machine learning model to help officers adjust their routines for better observation performance.
Streamlined Task Management
Command Cloud enables corrections staff to efficiently schedule and assign one-time or recurring tasks. These tasks can be linked to inmates, specific locations, or broader operational objectives, improving coordination and accountability throughout the facility.
Support for Early Activity Returns and Meal Documentation
Mobile Command XR simplifies documentation for inmates’ early returns from activities, complete with digital evidence for justification. It also ensures proper meal distribution based on dietary, medical, religious, or disciplinary needs, with evidence support for refusals and food quality.
Offline Functionality and Resilience
In the event of power or Internet outages, Command Cloud continues to function seamlessly, allowing staff to log checks offline. Once connectivity is restored, all activities sync to the Cloud with precise timestamps, ensuring no data is lost.
Command Cloud is setting a new benchmark in corrections management, empowering staff and improving efficiency while reducing risks and enhancing compliance. Real-time dashboards that display inmates who are no longer in their cell (due to being in medical, court, or another location), supplies issued, special statuses, tasks assigned to staff, etc., are useful, the ability to break down and analyze structured and unstructured out of cell time to help differentiate between the two ensures standards that focus on an inmate’s out for hour time are continuously met.
For example, agencies that are under federal consent decrees require more granular reporting on an inmate’s time spent outside of their cell than just simply knowing where they are or how many times they’ve been offered access to a certain program or resource.
Max Out of Cell time alerts staff whenever an inmate exceeds the maximum allotted time in a specific location that was predetermined and is configurable by agency administrative staff, giving staff the ability to monitor how long an inmate has been at specific out of cell locations, and ensures that alerts are provided if inmates exceed time allowed at certain locations.
A similar feature is the ability to keep inmates separate via mobile notifications whenever two or more inmates may converge in the same location. Keep separate tracking gives staff an awareness of which inmates are being moved out of their housing unit or out of cell location without having to go back and check this information in the computer.
From a reporting standpoint, diagnostic analytics to help your team build an informed data culture around your care, custody, and control mission-set. Toggle between team standards and state standards, identify trends and operational strengths and weaknesses across an array of business intelligence dashboards to achieve optimal, sustained outcomes. Cloud native reports that aggregate officer key performance indicators (KPIs) to quickly and easily identify individual performance measures across a number of compliance areas. These insights give supervisors the opportunity to proactively coach and work with these staff to improve their individual performance, increasing accountability and reducing liability.
You can also visualize individual officer statistics during their workday, including number of completed checks, number of late and missed rounds, and recommended randomization times to improve the performance of staggered, irregular rounds (Staggering Score). Supervisors can monitor all late checks and officer justifications and add their own comments for each late check. By creating a single point of record for all late checks, officer justifications, and supervisor comments, you can optimize preparation for jail inspections.
Command Cloud integrates with a wide range of third-party systems where time is of the essence – and seconds can mean life and death. This includes inmate health monitoring systems, such as OverWatch® by 4Sight Labs. This enables inmate distress notifications to be sent to Mobile Command XR, enabling officers to see and respond immediately to inmate needs.
Another way Command Cloud enables correctional officers to maintain agility and compliance is with Mobile Compliance Monitor (or “MCM”). MCM helps officers in maximizing their security round compliance with real-time information on the time remaining between rounds, sending alerts when it’s time to prepare for a check and when a check becomes overdue.
So how does Command Cloud know how much time remains between security rounds? Simple. The system looks at the time of your last check and the Max Check Time and displays the difference. For example, if you last completed a security check at 09:08 and the Max Check Time is 15 minutes, you have until 09:23 to complete a check. If the time is currently 09:17, MCM will show that you have six minutes remaining to complete the next check.
As a reminder, MCM does not encourage you to perform your security rounds at the frequency of the Max Check Time, such as 15, 30, and 60 minute intervals. Its intent is to provide guardrails to know how much time remains before the check is late. If you use Max Check Time as a kitchen timer, your staff will start developing predictable round patterns. We strongly recommend varying (or staggering) your rounds performance throughout your shift.
MCM supports customizable notifications delivered through audible alerts or discreet vibration (haptic) feedback, ensuring inmates are unaware of upcoming rounds. Similar to your phone’s notifications, you can choose between a haptic or audible alert within your device’s settings. As staff conduct rounds, checks with the most time remaining are moved to the bottom of the list, while those with the least time remaining appear at the top. This ensures that urgent checks are always the most visible. This is a core principle of the officer experience platform (OXP) – helping officers focus on what matters most.
MCM can also be filtered to show only the locations relevant to an officer’s duties, removing distractions from areas outside their responsibility. The combination of the alert system and color-coded timer enhances officer awareness and accountability, ensuring timely and effective security rounds.
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Command Cloud enables robust, secure integration with third party systems using our REST API (WolfPack) to integrate with everything from your JMS and video management system to heart monitoring systems, and more. Gaston County, North Carolina, and Orange County, California, built secure, real-time Command Cloud integrations with their jail management system in hours at no cost. Command Cloud REST APIs support both one-way and two-way integrations.
Another common enterprise integration that Command Cloud supports is its ability to streamline user access and maximize your security posture. Command Cloud supports integration with Microsoft Entra ID to enable Single Sign-On or “SSO.” SSO is an identification method that enables users to log in to multiple applications and websites with one set of credentials supported through integration with Microsoft Entra ID. This enables users to be created, managed, and removed through one directory and identity management service.
The three advantages of SSO integration with Command Cloud are:
1. Enhanced Security:
Centralized identity management improves
overall security.
2. Automated User Management:
With Command Cloud, you can build user groups and
assign user privileges automatically based on how your
users are assigned to groups in Entra ID.
3. Simplified Login:
Staff will have one less username and password to remember. While Command Cloud can support SSO integration with other identity management solutions, Microsoft Entra ID is the most widely used within our Warrior community.
Command Cloud also supports the use of assignable values to barcodes printed on a wristband or ID card, usable from mobile and web applications to allow for interoperability with other facility systems from commissary systems, such as Keefe, to electronic medical records like CorEMR.
When you look at the core functionality of a JMS, every JMS does the same things: managing the intake or booking process, capturing mugshots, storing property and charges, and overseeing housing assignments.
In fact, the core functionality of JMS platforms has remained largely unchanged for decades and is generally built around inputting data and running pre-built or specific custom-built reports. These systems are generally transactional in nature, focusing on repetitive administrative functions.
While some of today’s more modern jail management systems have simpler, intuitive interfaces, most legacy jail management systems have outdated interfaces that overly rely on manual data entry and repetitive tasks, resulting in complex user experiences. The interaction cost, which is the level of mental and physical effort a user needs to complete a task in a legacy JMS, can be exceptionally high. The result? Lower or more inconsistent usability.
Why do jail management systems have these challenges?
There are more than 18,000 police departments in the U.S. Each of these 18,000 agencies must deploy and operate certain software applications to meet their primary mission of protecting and serving the public.
The universal applications deployed by police and sheriff’s offices include computer aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS). Full-service agencies will need more sophisticated applications, such as Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems or investigation software.
But approximately only 1 out of 6 of these agencies will need a JMS. When the jail management system represents just a sliver of a public safety software company’s total revenue and customer base, it will also receive fractionalized attention in ongoing investment, product management, and research and development. This doesn’t bode well for capabilities like performing complex queries, machine learning models, natively using business intelligence to create diagnostic analytics, or mobile inmate tracking applications your JMS vendor has built.
You’ve also been likely told about the depth of product synergies that exist between your current jail management system and its new ad hoc mobile inmate tracking application and the virtues of its tight integration. The reality is: your jail management system’s ad hoc mobile inmate tracking application is like an air hockey table. It’s novel for the first few weeks of use, then you realize its immense limitations – dying a slow a death – either because of functionality that doesn’t exist, or functionality that doesn’t work. And this situation is not likely to improve because the bulk of your vendor’s user base is built around CAD, RMS, and dispatch – not the jail management system.
Here are a few key differences between an OXP and a JMS:
- An OXP is inherently Cloud native. It’s also designed to work with a high level of interoperability, meaning that an OXP, such as Command Cloud, supports full integration for free – or at the lowest possible price. Vendors who make jail management systems often charge exorbitant amounts on integrations.
That’s old school. - OXPs are intended exactly for who they’re named after: officers. An OXP supports the frontline staff, giving them tools and insights that make them more knowledgeable and responsive. This is part of the common operating picture that we discuss often.
- OXPs have a modern architecture to easily integrate and leverage artificial intelligence, including computer vision and machine learning models. Most jail management systems, even the most modern ones, are ill-equipped for the AI-first, Cloud-first world.
- OXPs are designed to address broader concerns such as compliance, operational defensibility, and officer performance measurement.
