Choosing the Best Guard Tour System for Your Correctional Facility

Corrections officer looking out through a interior window

Pen-and-paper logs for cell checks are unreliable and should be replaced with modern guard tour systems. The best guard tour patrol systems for jails, prisons, and detention centers offer superior safety, accountability and efficiency. (Need more info about the benefits and features for corrections? Check out our comprehensive guide to guard patrol systems.)

There are many options when it comes to guard tour systems. How do you choose the one that is best for your correctional facility? Keep reading for five questions you should ask to help you make that decision.

Understanding the Types of Guard Tour Systems

Before you can select the best guard tour system, you need to understand the different types available. Today, electronic guard tour systems typically use one of three technologies for tagging checkpoints at your jail or prison:

  • RFID (radio frequency identification) tags
  • NFC (near-field communication) tags
  • QR (quick response) codes

All of these types can pair with a mobile guard tour device and allow for physical scanning. The device is typically a wand or smartphone:

  • Wands were among the first guard tour solutions. They use handheld batons to scan tags at each checkpoint. Often, the wand stores the patrol data until it is connected to a centralized management system to upload.
  • Smartphones are a more modern solution, enabling immediate data transmission and additional features like multimedia documentation and body cameras.

So which is the best for your facility? We recommend asking a few questions to ensure you understand your specific needs and which guard tour system will best suit your facility.

Five Questions to Answer Before You Select a Corrections Guard Tour Software

1. Where are your checkpoints?

Start by analyzing your checkpoints regarding their vulnerability to weather, tampering and other threats like heat or chemicals.

While nearly impervious to extreme weather, tampering, heat and harsh chemicals, RFID tags can be more expensive than other options. If your checkpoints are in harsh conditions, they may not be worth the added expense. Also, RFID tags can be scanned from a distance. In certain situations this could be an advantage, but with a guard tour system, physical proximity is key to the process. RFID tags can also be scanned by mistake, and they may enable guards to short cut their rounds.

QR codes are the least expensive tagging method, but they are susceptible to vandalism, light, moisture and general wear and tear. Therefore, a facility may have to dedicate considerable time to maintaining them. Compared to RFID and NFC tags, scanning them takes a few seconds longer per checkpoint. Also, if you take a photo of a QR code, you can scan the photo from anywhere.

NFC tags are often considered the sweet spot. While less expensive than RFID tags, they are much more durable than QR codes and will function in all weather conditions. Also they are hard to tamper with, an important consideration for checkpoints accessible by inmates. NFC scanning happens instantly. Guards must physically tap their device to the tag to log their observation, ensuring that each checkpoint is properly visited.

2. What is your budget?

While jails and prisons want the most cost effective solution available, be sure to consider the long-term expenses of short-term savings. A few examples:

  • QR codes are cheaper to implement but take longer to scan. They may require more regular maintenance because they degrade more quickly.
  • Wands are less expensive than smartphones, but have limited features. They give no alerts to officers. As an older technology, wands typically store data until it can be uploaded to a computer through a docking device. This prevents supervisors from monitoring patrols in real time. Wands are also fairly limited in their incident reporting ability.
  • A system that doesn’t have a robust administrative backend or data storage may prove disappointing when there is a need for custom reports or integrations.

Don’t forget to factor in any ongoing costs, like monthly service fees, training costs, support packages, new user costs, and data storage fees.

3. How much time do you have for setup and training?

Setting up, installing and training offers and supervisors on a new technology system can be disruptive to your daily operations. Determine the average setup and training times for the guard tour systems you are evaluating, and think about how it will fit into your operations.

Guard tour systems with specialized equipment and devices may require more training than smartphones. The familiarity of mobile devices and mobile apps may make officer training more efficient for smartphone-based systems.

The more feature-rich the administrative dashboard is, the more time it may take to fully understand its functionality and how to maximize benefits. Likely the more a team invests in the software dashboard, the more they will gain from it.

4. What are your administrative and support needs from a guard tour system?

The best guard tour software can support your critical administrative functions. It’s important to decide the kind of support you need and make sure the guard tour vendors you are considering can meet those needs. Administrative support can include:

  • Detailed Reports – Can you generate reports for audits, insurance, legal defense, compliance and other uses? A robust administrative dashboard should allow for both routine, automatically generated reports and a wide range of custom reports that can be pulled by date range, specific watches, specific officers and other parameters.
  • Remote Access – If you want supervisors to be able to securely log in and monitor activity from off-site locations, remote access will be important. Can officers track inmates at off-campus locations, like when they are in transit or at the courthouse or hospital?
  • Connectivity – What type of internet connection, if any, is necessary for the system to work? If so, is there a way to store or transmit data if the connection is interrupted?
  • Customer Support – What options are available if you need support or have an issue with the platform?

5. What additional features do you need?

Guard tour systems can include a variety of related functions, or focus singularly on logging patrols. Consider if these additional features would be beneficial to your facility:

  • Reminders – How does the system ensure correctional officers complete their assigned watches and observations?
    Incident Reporting – Incident reporting requires devices that can log security events or report issues in addition to checkpoint visits.
  • Robust, Rapid Documentation – If you want to document patrols and cell checks with photos, videos and notes, you’ll need devices that can capture this media. How efficiently can data be entered?
  • Body Camera – A body camera contributes to officer and inmate safety. How easily can it be activated?
  • Inmate Tracking – Required inmate counts can be completed with some guard tour systems.
  • Jail Management System Integration – Some systems can integrate with your JMS or inmate management system for streamlined operations.

Find the Best Guard Tour System for Your Jail

Understanding the types of guard tour systems available and asking the right questions in your exploration process will help you narrow in on what you want your guard tour system to do for you and the problems you want it to solve. Based on your vision for the ideal guard tour system, you will be better prepared to find a product with the features that most closely match your wish list.

Life Check Systems is a smartphone NFC guard tour system. It includes a variety of features like on-demand bodycam, inmate tracking and more.