A jail in Australia has stopped using RFID to track inmates due to battery issues. Every time a battery failed it sent an alarm. Staffs were being overwhelmed by the number of alarms.
Over the past year we have seen a number of RFID installations in jails/prisons that have failed to drive the expected business benefits. All the failed projects have focused on inmate tracking and knowing where the offender was at all time. The average cost of a RFID implementation is running at around 2.5 million dollars per 10,000 beds.
Jails are tricky environments to install and use RFID, as the majority of jails are big concrete and steel buildings. The other big issue is that offenders do not want to be tracked and have lots of time to think about how to bypass the RFID system.
A global implementation of RFID across a jail may not be the best value for money at this time. I suspect that we will see a more targeted approach to RFID being implemented where the RFID is applied across a smaller number of inmates for a specific purpose.
