Berhampur: In an initiative to cope up with the increasing number of prisoners and rationalisation of their key business processes, Berhampur Circle Jail in Odisha’s Ganjam district is gearing up to install Prison Management System (PMS).
According to circle jail officials, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) has taken up the task of automating and streamlining the process of prisoner/visitor movement under the PMS. The PMS is expected to be implemented within one month when its application goes live, they said.
The PMS comprises 12 primary functional modules. More than 65 reports of various types have been developed under client/server architecture. The system has been developed, tested and implemented to make it as much as simple and user friendly.
The PMS has been integrated with biometric tools, which store an inmate’s biometric details at the time of entry and will be used to authenticate him at the time of his/her movement. There was a need for centralisation of prisoner’s data to facilitate information exchange and data sharing to the users of the prison, the officials said.
The PMS will also reduce administrative overheads, speed up responsiveness to users, reduce risks involved in inmate’s custody and eliminate obsolete processes.
It will facilitate, regulate and simplify the processes of meeting between the visitors and the inmates in the jail. It will help the prison authorities in identification/verification of the inmates using fingerprint-based identification tools.
The officials said there was a manual system of booking ‘mulaqats’ (meetings) in the jail for inmates earlier. “Centralised visitor record was not available. There was a lack of exchange of visitors’ information within jails and prison headquarters. No provision for identification/detection/verification of visitors was there. Keeping a tab on the movement of visitors/nefarious elements was difficult. There was no control either on multiple meetings with an inmate in a day/week or on the number of visitors permissible to meet with each inmate,” they added.
But with the introduction of PMS, all visitors coming to jail to meet the inmates will be photographed and issued a photo pass. Details of the visitors will be kept in the database and this information shared with police for the investigation, they added.