"We started laying the groundwork around the beginning of last year," said Kathy Gattin, Arkansas VINE/JailNet manager, of the Arkansas Crime Information Center (ACIC). "We didn't reach completion of the design phase until the fall, and started, in December, the first phase of JailNet -- which was to automate the county holding facilities that had no automation in place."
Once the automation measures were in place, she said, statewide data could be gathered for JailNet. The new system has been built on the middleware platform deployed with the state's automated victim notification service, called VINE, which keeps crime victims informed on the custody status of offenders and automatically notifies them of changes including release or transfer.
JailNet will give all 75 county jails a way to access information on the inmates they house, such as arrest records, state or federal NCIC warrants, whether the inmates appear on protective-order and sex-offender registries and probation and parole information. If a match is determined, the system will transmit a notice that will appear on the jail booking system to alert the local staff.
Jailers will also be able to maintain and retrieve incident reports on unruly inmates. Law enforcement officers can also use JailNet to determine if a criminal suspect is currently in custody searching across all Arkansas jails.
Gattin said the first phase was completed in January, and then the ACIC turned to another problem.
"From January to the end of March, it was vendor interfaces," she said. "We were contacting vendors, sending out design specs. There are more than 20 different booking system types in the state. What we wanted to do was give them our data layout, and have them adapt their booking systems to allow us to pull this data for JailNet."
The JailNet is being funded by a $400,000 federal appropriation, she said, and all county jails should be hooked up to the system by the fall.
"Each county jail will have the ability to input information into JailNet," she said, noting that the system will contain information from both county facilities and city police department booking facilities. "There's actually two parts to JailNet; input and Web access. It's a restricted, secure Web site, and all this data is going into a centralized database."
Law enforcement personnel can browse the database through the Web site, and Gattin said the ACIC is training local government law enforcement personnel across the state on how to use the JailNet.
