System to streamline Berhampur jail management

Berhampur : Berhampur Circle Jail here is ready to install Prison Management System (PMS) to cope with the problem of increasing number of prisoners being lodged in the jail. This comes at a time when the State government is taking steps to deal with problems of overcrowding in prisons, mobile phone and SIM card smuggling into jail, group clashes inside the jail and lapses by jail officials.

The PMS is expected to be implemented within one month when its application goes live, said the officials.

The National Informatics Centre (NIC) took up this task of automating and streamlining the process of prisoner/visitor movement. The software is made simple and each screen is not more than half a page so that data entry will not be cumbersome.

The PMS comprises 12 primary functional modules. It has been integrated with bio-metric tools, which store an inmate’s bio-metric details at the time of entry. There is a need for centralisation of a prisoner’s data to facilitate information exchange. It will reduce administrative overheads, speed up responsiveness to users, reduce risks involved in inmate’s custody and eliminate obsolete processes.

It will also facilitate, regulate and simplify the process of meetings between visitors and jail inmates.

Earlier, there was a manual system of booking ‘mulaqats’ (meetings) in the jail for inmates. The centralised visitor record was not available. There was a lack of exchange of visitors’ information within jails and prison headquarters. There was no provision for verification of visitors. Keeping a tab on the movement of visitors was also 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 each inmate. It was difficult for the jail administration to keep a record of those prisoners whose meetings were stopped by the courts by way of punishment. But now all visitors coming to jail to meet their relatives will be photographed and given photo pass.