As American physicist William Pollard once said, “Without change, there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement.”
Change can be thrust upon due to tragedy. Sometimes it’s because of accidental discoveries. And sometimes, it’s just evolutionary: it’s a better, clearer understanding gained over time.
That’s why “cell check” was renamed “observation check” in Command Cloud.
As time progressed, it was a gradual realization that we at GUARDIAN RFID (and our Warrior community) had outgrown the term “cell check” over 20 years. In this blog, we’ll explain further why we renamed the most widely used module in the Command Cloud ecosystem.
An observation check is a type of log that could be digitally captured 96 times a day or more per inmate, especially on high-risk inmates. Observation checks document what you see an inmate doing, what their behavior or disposition is like, or anything else you want or need to capture for your compliance and defensibility.
Remember the courtroom scene from the movie “A Few Good Men”? Sitting before a Grand Jury investigation for an inmate death could feel just that way. As we’ve often said to our users, “You have to imagine that you’re going to be called to the witness stand and an attorney’s going to ask you, ‘What did you see the inmate doing the last time you saw them alive?’”
You’re unlikely to remember the answer.
But even if you do remember, the documentation you capture (or lack thereof) can make the difference between your exoneration and culpability. Whether that’s fair or not is beside the point. As a correctional officer, this is the risk and responsibility you accepted, not dissimilar to surgeons dictating their notes after surgery or nurses charting in an electronic medical record system.
The best observation checks capture one (or several) of the following:
A good quality observation check on a suicidal inmate may sound something like this:
Another good quality observation check can take place nowhere near their cell. For example:
And then there are low-quality observation checks that are only marginally worth the paper they’re written on. These sound like this:
Sure, it’s good that you have digital proof of presence during your round, and that the check was done on-time to demonstrate compliance. However, these generic types of log entries don’t answer many questions if that inmate is found sick or dead two hours later.
Cell check was renamed observation check because, like most Warriors know, you can log what you see an inmate doing, or what their behavior is – anywhere in a jail or prison; it’s not always done in their cell. In fact, many observation checks are done in the dayroom, or the infirmary, during a program, at the hospital or doctor’s office, during a transport, and more. Anytime and anywhere you OBSERVE something noteworthy, log it.
Yes, observation checks do frequently take place inside a cell, but never exclusively. So, when you have a module named after a function that doesn’t always take place in a fixed location, you know you’ve outgrown the module name.
Example of the previous Cell Check module compared to today’s Observation Check module.
Observations are done all of the time by correctional officers. It’s important to understand that by renaming the module, we’re not diminishing the importance of knowing where or when an observation check took place.
In fact, you always want to ensure that these details are known in every observation check:
The “where” portion of these details will always be tied to the nearest Hard Tag, the inmate’s RFID credential, or their out of cell location – so no matter what observation you capture about an inmate, Command Cloud will always know where the observation was recorded – kind of like geotagging, for example.
If we were to have stayed the course with the “cell check” name, it could be misleading that you’re logging “cell checks” in spite of the fact that you’re nowhere near the inmate’s cell assignment.
Example of the previous Mobile Command screen with the core six modules, including the Cell Check module, compared to today’s Mobile Command XR screen with the core six modules, including the Observation Check module.
Don’t overlook the importance that observation checks can (and should) be logged on group inmate activities, too, not just on an inmate’s observable (solo) activities.
For example, imagine you see a small group of inmates in the dayroom. It’s always preferable to scan the pod’s Hard Tag, manually select all the inmates’ names you see in the dayroom, and log your observation check. It might sound like this.
This log might apply to 2 to 20 or more inmates. But by following this approach, you just logged an observation on 20 inmates simultaneously, each log populating in that inmate’s observation log for reporting purposes.
Another example might be:
The observation check module is far and away the most widely used module in all of the Command Cloud ecosystem. Its versatility to log any type of observation in virtually any circumstance in any location was the driving force for renaming the module from cell check to observation check.
Particularly for high-risk offenders, whether the inmate is suicidal, placed on administrative segregation, or some other reason, the importance of digitally logging the demeanor and physical attributes displayed by an inmate throughout a shift cannot be overstated.
Logging who, what, where, and when during every observation check can ensure high-quality documentation and reporting – diminishing any accusation of deliberate indifference by you or your staff – if a negative outcome were to occur.