Prison Pays

THE CHALLENGE

You are warden of a medium security prison. You allow your inmates a certain number of phone calls monthly in return for good behavior. As contact with the outside world is rare in a prison environment, this privilege is considered valuable, and coveted by the inmates. You thought such a benefit would encourage good behavior but experience proved differently.

To control calling, you assigned each inmate a Personal Identification Number (PIN). Each PIN had a specific list of blocked phone numbers, such as those of witnesses and victims. But as the value of the phone time became apparent, inmates began trading their minutes (and their PINs) for other items of value, such as cigarettes. This created a phone-time black market. Prisoners resumed their harassment of victims and witnesses by using other PINs, since the restricted list associated with each PIN was different.

You're under pressure to stop the harassment of victims and witnesses but the law doesn't allow you to suspend all phone privileges. To eliminate this type of abuse, you need to move beyond a PIN; you need a means to control calls by positive voice verification of each caller.

THE SOLUTION

You turned to advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies to help alleviate the problem. You installed a state-of-the-art specialized telephone system to manage inmate calling that controls outbound calls. Inmates are required to enroll in the system by repeating their secret phrase four times. They must use this pass phrase to initiate every phone call. Unless the verification system detects a match with the registered voice print, the inmate's call is not completed.

After installation, both extortion-related violence and the black market activity decreased substantially. Since the verification system prevented unauthorized usage at the time of the call, trading or threatening inmates for their telephone minutes was futile. And since the system was completely automated, prison employees no longer needed to track prisoner eligibility and minutes used.

The technology behind this application, SpeakEZ Voice PrintSM, is available today from T-Netix, Inc. (Piscataway, NJ), a supplier of automatic speech recognition and verification technologies.