Prison Information Management System For Department of Prison (PIMS)

The Department of Prison (DOP) manages the provision of custody, care, and correction for inmates in accordance of the prison ordinance, rules and regulation, escorting remand as well as convicted prisoners to and from courts and general direction and administrative control of all prisons, reformatories and open prison camps. The overall administration of the DOP is being carried out based on the rules laid down in the Prisons Ordinance enacted as ‘an ordinance for the better regulation of Prisons Act No. 18 of 1844’ and subsequent legislations incorporated into the same. The DOP, as a separate Government department was established in year 1905.

The persons, who are convicted of crime or suspected to be involved in crime or criminal activities, are housed in prisons of Sri Lanka and those prisoners are managed and looked after by the DOP and its institutes. The functions of the DOP are divided into Core and Supportive functions, where only the Core functions are covered by the scope of PIMS. There are three (3) identified Core functions;

1.                   Ensuring safe Custody of inmates convicted or un-convicted with maximum security involving admission and release with provision of intelligence and security services to ensure prison safety.

2.                   Ensure provisions of Care to inmates with the provision of accommodation, food and nutrition according to prison law and fulfilling minimum standards appeared in international conventions.

3.                   Ensure correction of inmates with spiritual guidance and counselling, provision of industrial, agricultural and vocational training and provision of adult education

The MRPR is of the view that the processes, which has been using for managing the prisoner information in prison institutions can be further improved through the application of ICT for effective and efficient prisoner information management. Having considered the impact and the feasibility, the Ministry has identified the PIMS as a priority project to make the prison information management more effective and efficient, while improving the monitoring, controlling and classification of prisoner information all over the country.

There are many specific objectives of the PIMS based on the Vision, Mission and Goals of the DOP as envisaged on the Corporate Plan of the department too.

·         Ensure admission of prison inmates to prison institutions strictly on classification with the support of ICT.

·         Increase the release of prison inmates on License Board and other special release arrangements.

·         Ensure the custody of prison inmates and security of prison institutions by strengthening the capacity of intelligence and security unit.

·         Enhance accommodation facilities for prison inmates with completion of the relocation program and with the support of ICT.

·         Enhance and ensure provisions of drug addict treatments for needy inmates with arrangements for social integration, adult education to reach higher literacy level and spiritual development of inmates.

·         Enhance industrial, agricultural and vocational training for inmates, enabling them to find employment at post release state.

·         Manage all administrative, rehabilitation and correction related information on the convicted and un-convicted inmates.

·         Establish effective and reliable authentication mechanism for identifying prisoners to minimize any impersonations of the prisoner.

·         Facilitating the retrieval of accurate information on prisoners in all form of institution, departmental, ministerial and any third party stakeholder requirements.

·         Availability of data in digital forms and thereby facilitates the DOP with all kinds of analysis, preservations and reporting.

Scope of Work;

1.       Conduct a system requirement verification study of the processes

2.       On completing the above, submit a requirement verification report.

3.       Design and develop the system, upon obtaining Ministry approval for the above.

4.       Adherence to e-Government Policy of Sri Lanka.

5.       Adherence to Web 2.0 concepts, open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles.

6.       Adherence to LIFe standards.

7.       Implement in collaboration with the SPA consultants appointed by Ministry, or review committee and facilitate the ‘Software Process Audit (SPA)’ specified by ICTA.

8.       Maintain project source code in the ICTA Source Code Management system (SCM).

9.       Maintain all issues in the Issue tracking system maintained by ICTA.

10.   Adopt a proper application release procedure to release the PMIS to Department during the deployment in the staging / production environments.

11.   Participate for Project Review Committee meeting and Project Implementation Committee (PIC) Meetings as a member

12.   Obtain User Acceptance (UAT) for the implemented processes.

13.   Deploy into production environment at Lanka Government Cloud (LGC).

14.   Provide support and maintenance services, from the date of launch till one year.

15.   Adhere to the Service Level Agreement, during the support and maintenance phase (SLA).

16.   Work collaboratively with Department of Prison, Ministry and ICTA throughout the tenure of the project duration.

Proposed PIMS is fully compliance with the objectives of the DOP. The system will be implemented centrally in the Lanka Government Cloud (LGC) where the all organization under the DOP will be able to access the system. The system is implemented in a Virtual Private Network (VPN) where the information security is very high though the system is engineered in a way of securing the entire system with industry best practices as well as security standard.

Functional Modules

The system functions are categorized in to 4 major areas:

1.       Registration Management

1.1   Admission of Inmates Module

1.2   Registration Module

1.3   Post Registration Module

2.       Transaction Management

2.1   Food and Nutrition Module

2.2   Medical Module

2.3   Appeal Module

2.4   Industrial Training Module

2.5   Vocational Training Module

2.6   Rehabilitation Module

2.7   Healthcare Module

2.8   Discipline Module

2.9   Movements Module

2.10            Events Module

2.11            Escorting module

2.12            Transfers module

2.13            Visit module

2.14            License module

2.15            Library module

2.16            Discharge module

3.       Support Functions

3.1   GIS Integration

3.2   Document Management

3.3   Content Management

3.4   Workflow Management

3.5   Report builder and Admin Module

4.       System maintenance

·         Admin module

Admin module is use for system configuration and hold the predefine parameters & master data which are required by the entire system.

·         Geographical Information System – GIS

GIS integration is available with the PIMS for graphical representation of data maps related to the inmates and their activities. This is capable of visualizing data in several layers.

·         Document Management System – DMS & Content Management System – CMS

DMS module and CMS module is used for the content management related to the inmates and inmate processes. These modules are integrated with the PIMS system so that the information storing, searching and retrieving are easy for the users.

·         Workflow Management System – WMS

This module helps system users to manage complicated workflow task in simple way. WMS is look after all necessary workflow behaviors defined and stored in the system for the users without burdening them.

Discipline Management Workflow :

§  -Report/ identify an incident matters for discipline (Open)

§  -conduct preliminary inquiry (Inquire)

§  -Preparation of Complain report (Complain)

§  -Acceptance of the complaint by inmate [Accept]

§  -Submit to Prison court [Investigate]

§  -Declare judgment [Complete]

·         Report Builder – Report Generation Module

Report Builder is a supporting module for the proposed PIMS to facilitate authorized system users to create ad-hoc reports on the fly. This module is capable of connecting database management system and extract required information for database tables, views, and queries. This facilitates advance users to create their own queries and build own report formats.

The recommended way of using the Report Generation Module is; providing accessibility to the module for an individual or group of selected users form each institution that are having knowledge of databases, report creation and having responsibilities on data to generate reports rather than exposing the module to all users of the system, which may create unknown security breaches unnecessarily. Required Reports can be requested from the Report Generation Group and then they are creating requested report as template or as globally available report.

·         Messaging

Automatic Notifications through the system

Based on pre‐defined parameters, a task can be automatically routed for investigation, response, and reporting. Notifications are sent to relevant departments and personnel. As an option, an escalation procedure can be triggered when a severity and priority threshold is breached. Notifications can dispatch automatically from email and through SMS to the relevant staff members and final result to the end user.

SMS module interfaces the PIMS with the SMSE of SMS service provider in order to handle all in bound and out bound SMS. In order to communicate with mobile network through SMS, PIMS requires SMS Gateway facility which is available currently with mobile service providers.