A System for All Seasons

Modern Design

It's (not) Good to be Redundant

Prison-Centric

Top-security prisons, detention centres, young offenders institutes and secure units. All can be considered to be prison facilities of one type or another but what is the difference between a security solution for a prison facility and security solutions designed to meet other applications ?

Probably the most unique differentiator is the fact that, whilst most security solutions are focused on stopping people gaining access to something, a prison facility security solution is focused on just the opposite, stopping people leaving. In this case, prisoners who are being detained at somebody else’s leisure.

One of the first questions which comes to mind when considering security solutions for prison facilities compared with, for instance, a public space system, is whether or not the proposed system will meet the specific requirements imposed by a prison facility.

Typically a prison facility security system maybe required to:

• Monitor the facility perimeter
• Protect areas of the facility designated sterile
• Screen the visitor centre
• Observe common facility areas

In meeting these requirements a combination of security technologies will be used including alarm monitoring and CCTV which is generally the predominant one due to the fact that it is proactive (alarm systems are reactive by nature).

Having established the basic responsibilities of a prison facility security system, what attributes should a modern design have ?

First and foremost it must be reliable. It must have a proven field service record and be supportable for a sustainable period which can often be ten years or more. It should also be fault-tolerant and easy to maintain. Prison facilities are often not the most maintenance friendly environments and any features designed into the system which assist the service provider are a definite plus.

A modern design also needs to provide integration of each system element to offer a complete security solution. By integration we mean a number of independent control systems (CCTV, Alarm systems, DVR systems etc) communicating together and integrated to provide the operator with all the information they need via a single user interface. What we don’t want is one master system controlling the complete security solution. This has been proven time and again not to work.

A security system, which is responsible for ensuring some of the most notorious characters in the land do not escape, could be considered to be ‘mission critical’. As is often the case with mission-critical systems they provide levels of redundancy in the event of main system failure. In reality this is an outdated concept because ‘when is redundant not redundant? When you are depending on it to work and it doesn’t !

A more modern design approach is a system in which the ‘redundant’ part of the system is always-on and used as part of the normal operation of the system.

An integrated security system which is focused on the needs of the prison and has the requirements of a prison facility at the centre of its design. That is what we mean by ‘prison-centric’.

Advanced features which are specific to Prisons:

• Visitor centre monitoring with instant playback facilities (without having to revert to a playback suite)
• Prisoner route planning incorporating automatic display, recording and auditing when moving a prisoner from location A to location B. eg cell to visiting centre.
• The ability to monitor, audit and remind operators of building contractors etc
• Virtual Monitor Wall (VMW) management integrating mimic displays, live and recorded CCTV images, alarm information etc.