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New system would help Ohio jail better track inmates

A new inmate tracking system will consolidate inmate data, increasing efficiency and organizing in jail management

By Rick Rouan
The Columbus Dispatch

COLUMBUS, Ohio — When a deputy at the Franklin County jail pulls up an inmate report, they see a name and a number but no mugshot.

The amount of cash that person brought in and should get back when they’re released is tracked on a different system. The mental health or addiction help they’re receiving isn’t documented.

Franklin County Commissioners will vote on Tuesday on a new $1.8 million jail-management system that could change all that.

The new system will make it easier for deputies to track inmates who have been to the jail multiple times and document their recidivism rate. Several systems, including mugshots, property tracking and incident reports, will consolidate into the new software or feed information into it.

It will link to databases at other agencies as well, including the Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Board and Veterans Services.

“This is kind of one of the linchpins,” said Maj. Chad Thompson, who is overseeing the group in charge of the county’s new jail project. “If we don’t know the people coming in, we have no way of tracking or reaching out to other partners. … All of these systems tie in together.”

The new jail will follow a “direct supervision” model, with deputies embedded in pods and inmates classified as similar living in the same quarters. Services that inmates need, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, would then be brought to the pods instead of taking the inmates out.

Commissioners already have approved spending about $2.2 million a year on 27 new employees who will screen inmates booked at the jail and $200,000 over five-years for the software they will use to classify inmates.

That software will feed into a new jail-management system, Thompson said.

If the contract is approved, the county will hire Poland, Ohio-based Intellitech Corp. to provide the software and service it for the next five years. The company will be paid more than $1.3 million in the first year and about $113,000 a year for the following four years.

The sheriff’s office expects the new system to go live in August 2017, said Dave Masterson, the office’s director of administrative services.

When it’s done, the public also will be able to search for inmates online to see why people were arrested and when they’re due in court. Now, the jail fields “hundreds” of phone calls a day from family members, Thompson said.

The county learned about the limitations of the current system when the Council of State Governments conducted an analysis of mental-health services in the jail, Thompson said. Officials realized they couldn’t pull together certain data, such as recidivism rates, because it wasn’t tracking inmates adequately.

Under the current system, for example, an inmate who is arrested multiple times received a new inmate number every time he or she was booked at the jail. Now, the office issues one number that will follow an inmate.

“You need to be able to collect more data and mine through that data to better serve the people who are being detained in your facility so that you can hook them up with various social services,” Thompson said.

Copyright 2016 The Columbus Dispatch

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