Posted on Tue, Mar. 11, 2008

Harrison County officials use clipboards and highlighters to count inmates at the overcrowded jail. Their $19 million computer system can't do it.

"The jail management system sucks," Sheriff Melvin Brisolara said.

When county leaders ask the sheriff how many inmates are booked at the jail, he dispatches deputies to walk the hallways, peek into the cell doors and tally the inmates one by one. It takes hours.

When county leaders ask for a breakdown of inmates booked at the jail, public defender Lisa Collums pores over stacks of papers with the names of 1,000 inmates, making horizontal swipes - orange for inmates charged with misdemeanors, yellow for those not indicted, and so on. It takes days.

But before the county joined the Mississippi Automated System Project, this critical information was available with the click of a mouse, officials said.

The MASP jail software, funded by millions of tax dollars, actually was developed overseas - either in Ukraine or Romania, MASP Director Julian Allen isn't certain - and county officials complain that they can't run a simple query to do the most mundane tasks.

"It's affecting me," Collums said. "I work all the time."

Collums needs this data fast to get inmates before the judge, out of the Larkin Smith Road jail and off the county's dime.

But the meticulous case-by-case process takes days, "as opposed to saying, 'Give me all your misdemeanors' and it spits them out," public defender Glenn Rishel said.

The drawback is staggering - dozens of inmates charged with petty crimes remaining behind bars, sleeping on makeshift cots throughout the jail, a constant source of acrimony, lawsuits, and the latest, a jail break.

Brisolara last month gave MASP officials an ultimatum: fix the problem in 45 days or find another client.

"I'll have to look somewhere else, because I've got to get this done," the sheriff said. "We've been in limbo now for six years. It's time to get it fixed. Time to move on."

'Useless' system

Launched in 2002, the MASP promised an information-sharing network to link Coast government agencies - police, fire, jails, courts - by computers. Streamlining this information could help solve crime faster and create more unity.

The University of Southern Mississippi is overseeing the pilot project, which was backed by Sen. Thad Cochran and former Sen. Trent Lott.

In addition to an efficient jail management system, patrol officers, using laptops, could swap real-time information - mug shots, criminal history, suspect alerts - instead of phoning other agencies.

But after spending $16 million of the $19 million it's been given, the MASP failed to launch a wireless network. And the jail management software, one of several computer applications offered by the project, is causing more headaches than it is saving time, county officials said.

"It's a piece of (expletive)," said Pauline Blackwell, a warrants officer at the jail.

"There's a lot of bugs with it," said Jackson County Sheriff Mike Byrd. "Sometimes it would go down and we couldn't book somebody."

Forrest County officials stopped using the system because of serious problems.

Other users say the software fails to accurately show an inmate's criminal record, frequently crashes and doesn't recognize a repeat offender's current mug shot, choosing the first one taken instead.

But the biggest gripe among users is not being able to run a query.

"That makes no sense," said Allen, the USM official in charge of the MASP. "We would not write something without a query (capability)."

Allen admits the software would be "useless" without such capacity.

But he said the problem has continued because his staff was never alerted.

"We always fix things if we know about it," he said.

For years, the Harrison County jail, with its faulty cell locks and no working surveillance, has come under intense scrutiny by federal and state authorities. One major problem is overcrowding.

To expedite mounds of criminal cases, the county in December 2006 opened its first public defender's office. Since then, county leaders often ask defenders such as Collums for a breakdown of the inmate population, commonly known as a "pop sheet." This helps gauge the turnover rate of getting inmates before a judge and out the door.

But if Collums can't run a query to see who's at the jail, it's hard for her to get them out.

In April, when the county was under a court order to reduce the jail population to 760, Collums spent every day except Easter with highlighters in hand.

The county didn't make it. State prison rights attorney Ron Welch eventually shut down the Cowan-Lorraine Road Work Center - which saves the county $2 million each year in labor costs - to move misdemeanor detainees from the jail into it. The center formerly housed state inmates who worked a variety of jobs in exchange for reduced sentences.

County officials say a Ukraine man - known only as George - is here on a temporary visa to work on the system. Brisolara said he is seeing progress and is confident that in 45 days, he'll have a system that is "up and running."

Sheriff's Capt. Walter Pitts, once a staunch supporter of the MASP, hopes the sheriff will ditch the system and return to the old "green screen" technology from the mid-1980s, which allowed officials to run queries.

"The old system worked perfect," Pitts said.

Officials still occasionally use this mainframe computer system because the MASP's software is so poor, he said.

"The system is just slow," Pitts said. "It's ridiculous."

'Green screen' technology

Before signing on for the MASP in 2002, Harrison County officials could retrieve critical jail data in seconds, such as the total number of inmates booked there, or the number charged with felons.

Officials then were using what's known by Coast law enforcement as the "green screen," a mainframe computer system that officials still use because the MASP's software is "not up to par yet," Sheriff Brisolara said.

Pitts wrote the original jail program with software guru Curtis Anderson, a former county employee.

"I didn't quite understand why they wanted to do something else," said Anderson, who lives in Tennessee. "You know as long as it works and it's solid, I didn't see a need of change."

Pitts wants the sheriff to return to the "green screen" and expand applications. But he said it would cost the county about $15,000 to fix what the MASP "screwed up."

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