SPARTAN

Do Court Transport Deputies Need Their Own SPARTAN?

Is it necessary for court transport officers to utilize SPARTAN while transporting inmates? What would that look like? How does it work without WiFi? What are the pros and cons of this process?

GUARDIAN RFID

Contributors:

Kenzie Koch |

Marketing Team Leader

Transporting inmates is a dangerous job. On average, there are over 300 reported inmate escapes every year. Of these escapes, 68% were from a caged vehicle, and 84% of the incidents, the prisoner escaped from the back seat of the caged vehicle. Furthermore, a study by the New York Police Department found that 40% of prisoner escapes happened during a prisoner transport.

With the high-risk nature of this job, court security officers are the individuals entrusted to transport inmates safely and ensure their secure return to the facility. This vital role raises a key question among agencies: Do my court transport deputies need their own SPARTAN?

In this blog, we’ll explore:

The primary responsibilities of a court transport deputy
How court transport deputies can use a SPARTAN
How Wi-Fi impacts the usage of a SPARTAN
How inmate movements work with court transport deputies
If court transport deputies should have their own SPARTAN

The Primary Responsibilities of Court Transport Officers Include:

Court security officers are tasked with transporting inmates to and from various locations including medical facilities for treatment, courthouses for hearings, trials, and other legal proceedings, as well as any other destinations ordered by the court.

Serving as a court security officer means ensuring the security and custody of inmates during transport and while at their designated locations. These officers are also responsible for maintaining public safety at such destinations. To prevent unforeseen incidents, officers are tasked with screening inmates for weapons or contraband before they enter court or re-enter the facility. Additionally, they are also trained to administer first aid to inmates when necessary.

The role of the court security officer can run smoothly when all involved parties—such as inmates, law enforcement, jail services, courts, and other criminal justice stakeholders— collaborate and adhere to established protocols.

How Can Court Transport Deputies Utilize a SPARTAN?

Let’s start with a real-life GUARDIAN RFID customer use case:

The Polk Co. Sheriff’s Office in Florida, which has used GUARDIAN RFID since 2011, uses Hard Tags, SPARTANs, and inmate RFID cards to create court transport records. The Polk Co. Jail system has effectively four locations:

Central Co. Jail in Bartow
South County Jail in Frostproof
Central Booking in Lakeland
The courthouse in Bartow

Each bus or transport vehicle has at least one RFID tag. As inmates move from their housing units to central booking to a transport vehicle, each step of the transporting process is captured via a scan of a Hard Tag from a SPARTAN device. This is what we call milestone movement logging.

This system effectively gives Polk Co. Sheriff’s Office a traceability solution to know which inmates are always in which vehicle. They can perform headcounts as inmates enter and exit the vehicle from their SPARTAN. If a transport vehicle were to break down, the court transport report has a detailed accounting of all inmates. They can also perform a headcount as inmates exit the vehicle and reaffirm their roster or “cohort” as they board another vehicle.

Another common example where court deputies can use SPARTAN is to perform observation checks and rounds in court holding cells—an environment where unpredictable and potentially dangerous situations can occur. Fortunately, a SPARTAN not only captures what is taking place in real-time, but it can also be used as a proactive measure to prevent inmate suicides.

Former correctional officer and author Gary York once said:

“We usually think of inmate suicides occurring inside jail or prison, however, another high-risk area for a suicide attempt is in the courtroom after a guilty verdict or at felony sentencing. Suicide prevention is part of our essential duties as detention deputies in the jail and as bailiffs at the courthouse. We must make a collaborative effort to work together in preventing inmate suicides at the jail or the courthouse as well as during transport between the two. Proper training on what can trigger a suicide attempt and recognizing the signs is essential.”

To maximize officer vigilance and ensure inmate safety, mounting Hard Tags in your court holding cells can help you perform strong observation checks with your SPARTAN. With tools such as Compliance Monitor and Mobile Compliance Monitor (MCM), you can programmatically set observation check requirements to be scheduled at set times during the week and receive digital notifications when checks are about to become due (or have become late).

For example, it’s common to set observation checks in court holding cells Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm. For additional diligence, you can mount Hard Tags inside and outside your court holding cells to ensure all areas are indeed empty. The Hard Tags placed inside the cells can be linked to your Compliance Monitor schedule and be set to the same check frequencies and times as your Hard Tags placed outside of the cell.

With many correctional facilities experiencing staffing shortages, more is being asked of a correctional officer. Mistakes can happen, such as overlooking an inmate left behind in a court holding cell – only to discover hours later during a headcount that an inmate is missing. Using a digital tool to ensure all court holding cells are empty is a first line of defense when it comes to quality assurance.

What About Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi is extraordinarily useful to have in any area where you’re responsible for the care, custody, and control of inmates. However, let’s say you have a tight budget, and Wi-Fi can’t be immediately included in your courthouse.

If this is the case, the SPARTAN has you covered. GUARDIAN RFID understands the position that many agencies are in when it comes to Wi-Fi. That’s why we built our system to have complete offline capabilities when necessary. Even when not connected to Wi-Fi, the SPARTAN’s data collection is still fully functional and stores any collected data locally on the mobile device, and syncs back to the Cloud once reconnected to Wi-Fi.

To be clear, every generation of Mobile Command has supported this feature for the past 20 years. Today, Mobile Command XR, which is completely rebuilt and modernized – was first designed and built from an offline perspective.

How Do Inmate Movements Work With Court Transport Deputies?

Court transport deputies are often trained to use their SPARTAN to log inmate movements just as housing unit officers and deputies are. If you apply the Polk Co. Jail system model, you can have Hard Tags on transport vehicles and in your court holding cells to scan and log movements.

However, in most cases, inmate identification is preferred. Whether an inmate is using an RFID wristband or RFID card, you’ll want to make sure of two things:

RFID wristbands should be fitted securely onto an inmate’s wrist. That means one finger can slide between the wrist and the inmate’s skin – not two, three, or four fingers. The wristband isn’t a bracelet that you take on and off. When it’s applied, It’s permanent until removed by a booking officer.

inmate wristband being scanned

2. RFID Cards should be clipped front-facing to the inmate’s uniform. It should always be on display for visual identification and easy accessibility for court transport deputies to scan.

inmate id card being scanned with spartan

While this doesn’t happen often, you may know of grumpy judges who complain about inmates being late to their courtroom. If that’s the case, we know of jails that will digitally log the time of arrival into certain courtrooms by scanning the inmate’s RFID wristband or RFID card and using an Out of Cell WordBlock such as “Arrived to Courtroom 1” to prevent show proof of presence at that specific time.