Remote identification and movement control techniques

A long standing requirement for the penitentiary services is the need to know the location of staff during an incident or when a personal duress alarm has been triggered. A second basic requirement is the ability to manage the movement of inmates inside the institutions. These requirements have generally been met through the use of post standards for the staff related functions, and control posts for the inmate movement control requirements. Alternate methods have been tried to automate this location identification process. Although the technology and concepts to track individuals or things have been refined recently, it has been shown that these techniques are not very effective in the indoor environment for applicationa which require a high degree of reliability and which cannot tolerate any time delays for information processing. The Correctional Service of Canada is embarking on a program to re-address these problems, and to develop new concepts and technologies in an effort to introduce remote identification and tracking techniques in an indoor environment. The purpose of the program is the development of a system which will be capable of identifying the location of every individual in a penal institution, to effect inmate counts, and to introduce a capability to manage the movements of the inmates which will be less intrusive than the existing methods, and which will allow the security staff to have more time to be reassigned to corrective and rehabilitative functions.