Leveraging technology to secure correctional facilities

MVP Tech – A Convergint Company evaluates how correctional facilities can secure their premises and protect inmates and staff with technological solutions.

Correctional facilities everywhere rely on guards, physical locks and razor wire to secure their premises and protect the people within them.

However, the prevalence of jailbreaks, violence, contraband smuggling and criminal activities show that old-fashioned security measures are both inadequate and ineffective to create truly secure prison premises.

Today’s correctional facilities need modern technologies that provide visibility into prison premises and perimeters, generate real time insights about incidents and intruders and enable officers to act quickly as soon as an incident is detected.

When combined with human judgment and wisdom, these new-age systems strengthen prison security and safeguard them from illegal, unsavoury and dangerous incidents.

Must-have technologies for correctional facilities

Today, correctional facilities and their decision-makers can choose from many solutions to secure their premises and people. These include:

Digital keycards and biometric-based identity and access management/control

In any correctional facility, it’s important to control prisoner movement and ensure that they remain visible to security personnel.

Movement control and visibility can prevent security incidents and keep everyone safe. And, for this, reliable access control is crucial.

Compared to physical keys and locks, digital keycards and biometric authentication systems are harder to compromise and therefore provide more reliable access control and much stronger security.

Digital and biometric systems can also keep out unauthorised or malicious users, while ensuring convenience and low-friction access for authorised users.

Smart visitor management

Visitors, both official and non-official, are a common sight in prisons. To maintain security, staff must be able to screen and identify all visitors when they enter and leave the facility.

They must also be able to account for all visitors during emergencies. It’s also crucial to ensure that visitors don’t stray into limited or no-entry areas.

Biometrics-based visitor management systems can help meet these goals.

These systems can be used both to identify known visitors by comparing their details to a database, as well as to authenticate identities and determine if they should be allowed to enter the prison premises.

Perimeter security

Jailbreaks are a serious security risk in prisons. Contraband like drugs and phones making their way inside the premises is also a threat.

To keep these out, jails cannot simply rely on tall fences, barbed wire, security guards or dogs.

After all, determined criminals can scale fences, avoid wire, take advantage of blind spots and even drug dogs.

Instead of these security measures, correctional facilities will benefit more from perimeter security systems. These systems provide effective and proactive protection for the entire prison facility.

A robust system – particularly one that seamlessly integrates with other security tools – can identify threats inside and outside the prison walls.

It can also raise alerts, providing early warnings about a detected threat that human personnel can investigate.

Customised, well-integrated solutions designed by prison security experts like MVP Tech – Convergint EMEA also facilitate effective communication among jail staff and provide real time insights that help decision-makers to strengthen existing security measures.

Drone detection

Increasingly, criminals use drones to deliver phones, drugs, weapons and other contraband to prisons.

A drone detection system continuously monitors the perimeter for drones; armed with radio frequency sensors and optical verification capability, it provides security teams with full visibility.

On detecting drone activity, it raises alerts that enable security personnel to act quickly to address the threat.

Many of these systems can also be configured to automatically disrupt any drones that enter a specified perimeter.

With its detection, alerting and disruption capabilities, a drone detection system helps to mitigate the threats associated with drones and provides comprehensive protection for the entire prison site.

Vehicle scanning and detection

Vehicles are often used as conduits for smuggling drugs and weapons into correctional facilities and to pass messages from prisoners to those outside. These issues create serious security risks that cannot be mitigated by manual inspections of vehicles or drivers.

What can mitigate these risks is a solution powered by high-resolution cameras, ANPR technology and deep learning algorithms. This kind of system harnesses these advancements to recognise vehicles and detect anomalies in undercarriages that may indicate the presence of some illicit material. Adding such solutions enhances the speed of vehicle inspection and keeps vehicular traffic flowing smoothly. It also reduces the inspection burden on staff and helps keep staff and inmates safe.

Video analytics

CCTV cameras are a common sight in most prisons. However, these systems often have blind spots since they cannot surveil every part of a facility.

Additionally, human operators are needed to monitor cameras, which can be a challenge in understaffed correctional facilities.

It’s also not easy to track high risk individuals or groups in real time using CCTV cameras.

AI-based video analytics can effectively mitigate these challenges.

This innovation in prison security and surveillance enables teams to harness capabilities like object detection, facial recognition, behavior analysis, real time alerts and intelligent insights to detect and mitigate threats like contraband, weapons, fights and escape attempts.

Integrated, customised solutions

While all prisons face similar security risks, a one-size-fits-all solution cannot suit them all.

Depending on inmate population, staff strength, facility size, security level and other factors, correctional facilities need customised solutions that address unique needs and minimise prevalent risks.

In addition, the solutions must not be siloed but must integrate with each other to create a strong, uncompromising security infrastructure.

Also, security staff must be able to easily add or remove tools or modules as the facility’s needs change.

They must also be able to manage and upgrade all implemented tools from a centralised, user-friendly console.

Correctional facilities cannot achieve all these goals with off-the-shelf, generic security tools.

Fortunately, they can – with integrated, customised solutions designed by an experienced security expert like MVP Tech – Convergint EMEA.

MVP Tech – Convergint EMEA

MVP Tech specialises in designing state-of-the-art, cost-effective and customised security solutions for correctional facilities.

Our large on-the-ground team can deploy complex security infrastructure that integrates multiple tools.

These modules can also stand alone to provide enhanced flexibility and scalability for any type and size of prison.

Prison security staff and managers can easily control and optimise the modules and the entire infrastructure from a centralised command-and-control platform.

They can also view visual dashboards and reports to keep an eye on the prison’s threat landscape and determine if any changes are required to strengthen defences.

Our solutions also include advanced forensic features to cover any security scenario and enable easy investigations of incidents.

Additionally, AI-powered video analytics provide real time surveillance and smart insights to enable more effective and proactive protection of every part of the facility.