Evidence Management Software for Security in Correctional Facilities

Prison and security professionals in correctional facilities cannot be everywhere at once. Therefore, monitoring inmates from cameras such as CCTV plays an essential role in maintaining order and ensuring safer work environments. A large prison has numerous cameras installed, and the contents of each of these cameras would be stored and managed on its video surveillance systems. However, analyzing these digital evidences becomes an inconvenient and inefficient task as those in charge of ensuring security need to work with multiple surveillance systems. For instance, a correctional officer trying to look for incident data that appears in video footage of numerous cameras will access several surveillance systems to make an accurate analysis. This task is unproductive, and in cases such as where sharing of digital evidence is required to external viewers such as courtrooms, searching for the relevant evidence from multiple systems is a struggle for any correctional officer or employee.   

VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System offers a centralized solution to correctional facilities to store, manage, and analyze ever-increasing digital evidence by integrating with multiple existing systems. VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System is designed to co-exist with existing infrastructure protecting the financial investment already made by correctional facilities.  

VIDIZMO’s DEM can ingest digital evidences from all formats and sources: such as CCTV cameras, phone recordings, images, docs, body-worn cameras, dash cams, interview room cameras, and many others. VIDIZMO, through a consolidated system, helps correctional facilities provide a constant presence of surveillance. This surveillance allows officers to spot suspicious inmate activity and can prevent prison incidents from getting out of hand.  

What VIDIZMO’s DEM offers to Correctional Facilities? 

Artificial Intelligence (AI): VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management (DEM)  uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) features to provide features such as facial recognition, inmate tracking, video redaction, and others. Offering an easy route for correctional facilities to harnessing AI to analyze data, ingest, index, search, and organize their digital evidences.  

For instance, in extensive correctional facilities that have multiple areas that are covered by surveillance cameras, features such as facial recognition are of crucial benefit to security professionals. In particular, when inmates are usually wearing the same type and color of clothing. VIDIZMO’s facial recognition feature can identify individual inmates by faces. In scenarios such as inmate attacks, security staff can see the inmates involved in attacks by face. This allows the security professionals to compare the perpetrators that appeared in a video and photographic pieces of evidence against booking databases of known offenders systematically to pinpoint the potential suspects. Review and filter the matches found in the video and images results by identifiers such as gender, age, height, hair color, eye color, ethnicity, and more.  

Inmate Search:  Video Surveillance is prevalent throughout correctional facilities. In cases where facilities face a shortage of personnel to watch over the inmate population, video surveillance aids in the oversight of inmates and increases accountability. But these surveillance activities create massive amounts of videos that need to be searched later on.   

VIDIZMO has made searching for video both within the platform and searching inside the video easy for any correctional facility. By selecting the right faceted search/ multi-dimensional search or platform search or search inside the video features allow security professionals to drill down into searching results with precision and accuracy.  

For example, security professionals can search for the precise time when an inmate appeared in a lengthy video. By clicking the face icon of the inmate generated by VIDIZMO’s AI system, security professionals watch only the relevant part of the video where the inmate appeared instead of watching the entire video.  

Share:  Correctional Facilities often have to share digital evidences such as CCTV footages with courts, defense attorneys, and other law enforcement agencies. Digital evidence sharing is an integral part of the legal process. However, in the case of video evidence, the sheer size of the files makes it very difficult to carry out evidence sharing across traditional storage devices such as DVDs or even over the internet. VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System addresses this by allowing straightforward content sharing with internal and external (third party) users.    

Internal sharing takes place via active directory authentication while external sharing is carried out using a secure online link, i.e. a password-protected URL. In the instance of external sharing, viewers can click on the ‘share’ button below the video. This will generate the option to share digital evidences through email addresses. When digital evidence is shared through an email address, the viewer will have to enter the email address of the point of contact in the external department. By clicking on the option to ‘refer’ or ‘limited share,’ an email will automatically be generated to the user containing the link to the media.    

Chain of Custody:  VIDIZMO’s DEM maintains audit logs of all those accessing the system, and supports the chain of custody requirements. While also maintaining top-notch privacy and confidentiality standards by tracking every user action within the system. The Admins and Managers assigned by correctional facilities can access audit logs that are used to track and record user activity such as login, date, time, actions performed. This includes the content viewed, change in settings, upload, add and delete users, campaigns, collections, etc.  

To know more about how VIDIZMO’s DEM can offer correctional facilities a centralized solution, contact us today or visit our website for details.