Officer experience platforms are for any size and type of correctional facility that have either begun their digital transformation journey, or are ready to take their first steps to digitally transform their operations and teams, phasing out analog, manual-based systems. This includes county jails, juvenile detention centers, prisons, and federal detention centers. Whether you manage 10 or 10,000 inmates, an OXP can provide value to every level of your team, from line staff to administration. OXPs are also ideal for corrections teams seeking to improve awareness, collaboration, insight, and discoverability throughout your entire team, from frontline to administration. Correctional officers often rely on analog, paper-based systems or enterprise systems that serve as data warehouses. This includes most jail management and offender management systems and security camera systems. They collect data. They output data. However, they too frequently fail to foster collaboration, or provide the visibility and contextual awareness needed to fully execute mission-essential objectives with efficiency. As a result, many facilities that have poorly organized data or siloed applications holding data with marginal relevance or value find it challenging to:

• Prioritize tasks
• Identify and measure areas of under-performance
• Address ambiguous operational problems
• Apply moment-to-moment decision making

By fusing certain data from multiple sources and systems, an officer experience platform can provide the clarity and direction officers need when seconds count. 

At its core, an Officer experience platform creates a common operating picture to deliver real-time situational awareness. An OXP delivers stronger:

1. Awareness: An observation of what’s happening in real-time, whether it’s the current behaviors of an inmate, the present performance of your team or yourself, the location of certain inmates, the status of our cell checks on high-risk inmates, or inmates that have yet be offered their out for hour today. 
   
   
2. Collaboration: Working as a team on a shared objective, project, or mission. This can include everything from coordinating and assigning ADA compliance tasks to specific shifts or specialists, or communicating the care and custody requirements around inmates placed in segregation.
    
3. Insight: An understanding of what’s happening (or what has happened) based on historical patterns and decisions, whether good or bad. For example, our team has a highly predictable pattern of starting our 30 minute checks every 26 minutes over the past 90 days. Or, our housing units have an average headcount clear rate of 17 minutes, but Alpha unit has an average clear rate of 46 minutes over the same time period.
   
   
4. Discoverability: The level of effort required to find data or information you are seeking, and coming across related information that can provide better contextual understanding. For example, I may search for an inmate by last name while searching for the phrase “fighting,” and see logs, reports, videos, and images that meet my search criteria, but also see related search results that include instances of the phrase “yelling” and “arguing” at the same time for a deeper, more comprehensive understanding.

A common operating picture consolidates information from a number of different systems visually presented on a single pane of glass, bringing faster, more concise insights and situational awareness to strengthen your entire organization, from frontline to administration. 

Most inmate management processes require clear, frequent communication across teams in order to achieve positive outcomes.

Take for example processes around administrative segregation. 

A growing number of jurisdictions, such as the state of California, require inmates to have medical screenings within hours after admission to segregation, while ensuring segregated inmates are permitted a minimum of one hour of out-of-cell time per day, five days a week. When a recreation yard is not available, yard time may be substituted for these out-of-cell periods, provided that exercise opportunities are available at least three days a week for a total of 10 hours a week. 

What’s more: inmates in segregation must have law library access at least two hours per week, or four hours if defending themselves, and if a cell does not have access to toilet flushing, a log must be kept to record when an officer flushes the toilet. 

These are just a short list of examples of inmates’ rights according to the Conditions of Confinement in Administrative Segregation. Fail to log any one of these points, and you risk not only being out of compliance, but legal challenges from inmates in question. 

An officer experience platform fosters awareness and collaboration in order to support consistent execution of responsibilities that may depend on specialists or multi-disciplinary teams to achieve positive outcomes. 

Most states have adopted a standard that may sound like this:

Safety checks shall be conducted at least hourly through direct visual observation of all inmates. There shall be no more than a 60 minute lapse between safety checks. There shall be a written plan that includes the documentation of routine safety checks.

States that have adopted a “no more than 60 minute lapse between safety checks” standard, often see shifts that perform a check at the 58th minute, wait two minutes, log the next hour’s checks, and not return for nearly another hour. This certainly gives less motivated officers a gigantic loophole to meet standards.

Similarly, every state should conduct staggered cell checks at irregular intervals not to exceed 15, 30, or 60 minutes in most cases. Yet over 90% of correctional officers will start their rounds at the same time, everytime. 

Inmates are highly observant. They’ll detect a predictable pattern of officer behavior. They know when to anticipate officers coming around to do their checks, in which case they’ll stop whatever bad behavior they’re guilty of for a short period of time, then resume that bad behavior after officers have left. 

This special moment in time is what we call, the “Window of Fuckery.” 

Conducting your cell checks within an officer experience platform goes well beyond digitally logging your checks, and knowing whether they’re done within a timeframe accepted by jail standards. An officer experience platform should:

1. Know how truly random (or predictable) rounds are being conducted. 
2. Use business intelligence dashboards to visualize any clustering effects of rounds being performed at the same time, everytime.
   

See when rounds need to be done to avoid late checks at any cost using digital timers. At the same time, an OXP should provide AI-driven notifications unique to the staff member when to start rounds as it begins to understand patterns of officer behavior. 

An inmate tracking system (ITS) is an important component of an officer experience platform (OXP). Inmate tracking systems are responsible for tracking all inmate activities and movements. Inmate tracking systems can also concentrate on digitally tracking movements from medium or long-range distances with particular attention to location and an inmate’s proximity to other inmates. 

No matter your definition of inmate tracking systems, an ITS is an example of an application that integrates with an officer experience platform to help form a common operating picture. 

An ITS does not compete with an OXP. An ITS doesn’t constitute an OXP. An officer experience platform must integrate a multitude of information systems, while using artificial intelligence and machine learning to refine and make inferences using data from these traditionally disparate systems without being explicitly programmed to do so.

According to Lt. Gary Cornelius: “The safety of inmates, offenders and staff are directly related. The fewer staff you have, the less safe everyone is.” Over the past two years, corrections as a profession continues to face significant headwinds when it comes to staff retention and recruitment. Take for example correctional facilities in the state of Georgia, some of which reported 70% vacancy rates in 2021. 

Innovation can inspire a new generation of correctional officer 

Technology can play a powerful force in recruiting young professionals looking to start and build a career in law enforcement. Command Cloud fills a void in corrections technology where there's either too little data to make informed decisions, or too much white noise data that's of marginal relevance. Command Cloud brings empowerment to a new generation of correctional officer, modernizing your technology stack in ways highly familiar to those raised in a high-tech era.

At the same time, technology such as an officer experience platform can act as a powerful retention tool when it comes to acting not just in its ability to improve personal productivity, but when applied as a hyper-vigilant, force multiplier to create safer environments monitoring for specific threats.

We believe an officer experience platform fills a missing gap in the law enforcement/public safety space. Too often, those who are responsible for enforcing the law, lack the insight and awareness needed to perform to the best of their ability. Frequently, they have too little data to make an informed decision, or have too much white noise data. More often than not a fusion of data from a variety of sources and systems is what's most beneficial, but also, most complex to operationalize.

An OXP should create a common operating picture across virtually every functional area of inmate management. This includes cell check performance. But not just the act of digital logging checks that are stored in a central repository. An OXP should go beyond the simple act of data collection. It should also bring AI-based guidance on how to close the Window of Fuckery, and maximize your team’s performance around staggered, irregular checks. 

Inmate management requires you to harness the complete power of your people, processes, and systems. You cannot effectively manage your offenders or your teams in a vacuum. Siloing processes is like looking at the universe through a keyhole. An OXP removes the blinders, providing a clear, complete view of the night sky.

Take for example your fixed security cameras. For decades, correctional facilities have relied on camera systems for general surveillance. But too often, bad things happen on camera that go unnoticed in real-time. And science has proven that we, as humans, can’t effectively handle more than two complex, related activities at once. 

We’ve witnessed a number of events over the years where officers and inmates are assaulted in plain view of video walls in control rooms. Minutes go by before someone sees a situation that requires immediate action. Computer vision systems, such as VisionOps, serve as the second and third set of eyes to assist the control center operator that is answering a phone, watching different cameras, logging activities, and opening doors all at the same time. Computer vision is a hyper-vigilant technology to monitor movements, threats, and rules violations, acting as a force multiplying technology for those frontline staff members. This is especially important when considering officer to inmate ratios are at an all-time high. 

According to a survey conducted by One Voice United, staffing levels and job dangers are amongst the highest rated concerns by corrections professionals. While 80% reported that the incarcerated population is increasing at their facility, 98% reported that officer staffing levels are decreasing at their facility. Low pay and a poor public image of the profession are among other key concerns by correctional officers. 

An officer experience platform pulls together people and systems, using artificial intelligence to sharpen the spear by creating a common operating picture. OXPs can dramatically improve the collaboration, insight, awareness, and discoverability needed by corrections professionals to meet your daily mission-set. 

Considering the tremendous headwinds in corrections when it comes to retaining and recruiting talent, Command Cloud as an officer experience platform provides the deepest, broadest, and most powerful best-in-class capabilities that not only improve productivity and modernize correctional officers, but deliver the hyper-vigilance needed to protect America’s Thin Gray Line against physical threats they can’t always see, serving as a force multiplier to accomplish our most important objective: helping you to get your team home safe.