KARACHI: The Sindh prisons department has proposed a plan to provide phone facilities in 24 jails in the province with a view to providing the facility for the inmates who had no connection with their families and to strengthen the security arrangements.

The first phase of the project is estimated to cost Rs60 million.

“This plan will discourage the illegal usage of mobile phones in jails and facilitate inmates’ communication with their families,” said a senior official in the department.

The plan’s scope included procurement of public call office (PCO) equipment; hiring of a firm for installation of hardware; and hiring of manpower.

Its technical features included the system’s ability to record all outgoing calls with tracking and storage, tele-maintenance access to maintain the system remotely, and cutting off calls after the designated time limit.

The project envisages building fibre-glass cabins to restrict others from overhearing conversations and to improve the quality of voice recording; and safe-keeping of voice records to maintain confidentiality.

A separate account would be maintained for deduction of call charges as the call charges invoice, along with the current balance, would be issued to inmates after every call, officials said.

They added that a comprehensive database of inmates would be maintained and every inmate would have access to PCO as per designed schedule.

An officer would exclusively be assigned to supervise the PCO-related operations as the project would be headed by a project director, who would be hired from the market.

“[The] installation of PCOs will be helpful in elimination of mobile phone and also improving security of prisons,” said an official, adding that it would help inmates by providing them the facility of communication with their families [blood relatives] for 20 minutes per week.

Giving technical details of the project, officials said the system would be capable of creating and managing at least 3,000-plus user accounts; and generating prepaid vouchers with different denominations. The rate of a call would be manageable by the system administrator and charged at Rs5 per minute either on mobile or landline calls.

They said each user account would be assigned a PIN code with one’s client ID for additional security for dialling; and up to five fixed numbers against each user would be assigned which could be dialled as abbreviated dialling rules.

Auto call cut-off facility would be used after completion of weekly assigned time quota of each user. Besides, live and recorded call listening and real-time or on-call interference and monitoring facilities would be there.

Officials said though certain key prisons, including Karachi and Hyderabad, had been secured through phone jammers, many were still not capable of stopping certain ‘influential’ inmates, including the ones having links with militant organisations, from using phones inside their cells.

However, the jammers had chiefly affected the ordinary prisoners and their families who could not communicate and lacked resources for frequent meetings.

Officials, however, said security of the jails had already been put on high alert following the threats of attacks from banned organisations. Sophisticated weapons were also being provided to all jails of the province.

Published in Dawn, February 25th, 2017