1. Microsoft Government
Customer Solution Case Study
Arkansas Deploys Information Management
Solution to Improve Prison Security
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Government—Local
Customer Profile
The Department of Corrections is a vital
part of the criminal justice system in
Arkansas. The Department’s first mission
is to protect public safety, as it works to
provide cost-efficient, superior
correctional services that return
productive people to the community.
Business Situation
The Department sought a solution that
would help it to aggregate and analyze
data in an effort to reduce contraband
activity across state prisons.
Solution
The Department deployed a customized
version of the Fusion Core Solution,
which is based on Microsoft SharePoint
technology.
Benefits
 Rapid adoption by Department teams
 Improved allocation of law
enforcement resources
 Safer environment for staff and
inmates
“We are able to see problem areas now which we could
not necessarilyhave visualizedbefore. Over time, the
analysis will make an increasinglypositive impact on
the securityand safety of the prison workforce. It will
make a difference.”
Ray Hobbs, Director, Arkansas Department of Corrections
The risks of inmates bringing contraband into the Arkansas
prison system has decreased exponentially since the Arkansas
Department of Corrections started applying the principles of
business intelligence and predictive analytics to identify, track,
and act on suspicious trends within its prison walls. By deploying
a customized version of the Fusion Core Solution, based on
Microsoft SharePoint technology, the Department can analyze
previously siloed databases that detail everything from inmate
movements to banking transactions and telephone records.
Now, the IT staff is working hand-in-hand with investigators to
stop the flow of drugs and other illicit materials (including
mobile phones). In the process, the Department has created a
safer and more secure environment for prison guards, support
staff, and the inmates themselves.

2. Situation
In correctional institutions, a primary source
of criminal activity stems from the illegal
introduction of drugs,money, mobile
phones, and even weapons.The
contraband issue is a persistent challenge
to prison systems around the country. It
exposes staff and inmates alike to health
risks, violence, and generally threatens
institutional stability.
At the Arkansas Department of Corrections,
led by Director Ray Hobbs, significant
strides are being made to safely and
securely identify patterns and behaviors
that are consistent with contrabandactivity.
In doing so, new opportunities are created
for investigators to narrow their focus and
more efficiently allocate resources to
confiscate dangerous contraband.
“Contraband has been an ongoingissue for
us,” explains Daniel Potter, Assistant IT
Administrator at the Arkansas Department
of Corrections. The Department has more
than 20 facilities and employs 4,000 guards,
investigators, and staff across the state.
Potter, along with his colleague Charles
Bass, who handles support analysis for the
inmate management system, and an
interdisciplinary teamof investigators,
security officers, and administrators, are
harnessing the power of business
intelligence and predictive analytics to
attack prison contraband activity across the
state.
Contraband interdiction and confiscation
initiatives have typically been addressed by
each facility, which generally run as
independent standalone organizations. The
process of finding drugs, money—and the
illegal mobile phones that are used to
coordinate this criminal activity—was
typically based on guards being vigilant,
case officers’ workingrelationships with
confidential informants,and other
traditional investigative and law
enforcement practices.
A few years ago, however, the Department
began to explore two key questions:
 Is there a basis for believing that an
anticontraband effort across all the
prisons in the system could yield positive
results?
 Can information technology be used in
the fight against prison contraband?
“As we decided to address some of the
problems around contraband—the
smuggling of mobile phones, drugs,and
money—we formed a committee to explore
what could be done to address this,” says
Potter. “We brainstormed a variety of
different scenarios, and we determined that
we needed to figure out a way to capture
and analyze data that would provide insight
into the flow of contraband and then find a
way to put a stop to it.”
As the committee began to gather
intelligence on the options available for
pursuing an effective anticontraband
strategy, Potter and his team reached out
to their technology partners.
“We contacted our Microsoft
representatives and asked themwhat they
had that could help us out with this. That is
how we were introduced to the Fusion Core
Solution,” he says.
Solution
The Arkansas Department of Corrections
began to investigate the Fusion Core
Solution. Designedand developed by
Microsoft to operate in local and regional
hubs for collecting, managing,and
analyzing massive amounts of law
enforcement data, the Fusion Core Solution
gathers data that can be used to create

3. actionable intelligence. While today it is
mostly used by law enforcement and first
responder organizations that need to work
across jurisdictional and regional
boundaries (enabling federal,state, and
local collaboration), elements of the
solution were applicable to the Arkansas
Department of Corrections.
Fusion Core Solution,which is based on
Microsoft SharePoint technology, takes
data from disparate sources and fuses them
to form a complete picture that enhances
awareness, planning, prevention,and
response to incidents or potential
developments. It was conceived as an
integrated platformfor the entire life cycle
of intelligence analysis—fromintake to
analysis to dissemination across multiple
organizations.
“This seemed like it was a viable option for
us to pursue,” says Potter. “So we
implemented the Fusion Core Solution and
made some customized modifications. Now
we are using it in conjunction with our
mobile phone forensics system, our inmate
management systems, and our financial
systems. I am bringing information into
Fusion Core Solution fromjust about every
data source that I have.”
The IT team at the Department can use
Fusion Core Solution to break down the
functional silos of computing while also
providing an effective avenue for
integrating data sources fromacross the
prison system.
The initiative made an immediate positive
impact on the anticontraband initiative.
“When we find a contraband phone and
confiscate it, we use our forensic system to
do a full analysis. We pull up stored images,
videos, all of the contact information, in
addition to inboundand outbound records,
voice, and text messages,” says Potter.
The data is poured into the Fusion Core
Solution, which the IT team uses to cross
correlate, compare, and analyze the data
against the inmate management system (a
package called eOMIS provided by Marquis
Software).
This allows investigators to identify patterns
and connect the dots against databases
that monitor:
 Population tracking
 Custody classification
 Sentence calculation
 Risk and needs assessment
 Jobs and programs
 Property inventory
 Monitoring and transfer
 Visitation tracking
 Grievance tracking
 Security threats
 Incident report tracking
“Beyond these systems, there are another
half dozen dedicated databases across the
state, which track different aspects of
prison management, and data fromthose
sources are also fed into Fusion Core
Solution,” says Potter.
Thus, Potter and his team are now able to
mine all of these sources to find interesting
data correlations. He points out, however,
that it is easy to get lost in all of the data.
Putting a disparate array of databases into
a single repository was only the first step.
The Department also needed a way to
make sense of the information to support
day-to-day analysis and decision-making.
Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for
SharePoint provides enterprise search
across multiple data repositories in the
Fusion Core Solution and was a critical
feature in delivering an intelligence
gathering and analysis platformthat would

4. address the challenges the Department of
Corrections faced.
But it was the PowerPivot features in the
system that turned the data into an
opportunity to mine actionable information
that could be used to identify behaviors
consistent with contraband activity.
PowerPivot is a plug-in for Microsoft Excel
spreadsheets that works in an enterprise
needs sharing and control scenario by
operating within SharePoint.
“Using PowerPivot allows us to manipulate
the data in the way that we need to and it
feeds right into the dashboards that we
create on the Fusion Core Solution
environment. It allows us to visualize the
data so that we can see patterns and not
just data points,” says Charles Bass, IT
eOMIS Software Support Analysis at the
Arkansas Department of Correction.
Benefits
The Arkansas Department of Correction
teams involved in mitigating criminal
activity within the prisons have rapidly
adopted the Fusion Core Solution to gain
many new capabilities.
“We have made the system available to our
teams in a pretty seamless manner,” says
Bass. “We spent a few hours training them;
however, most of the staff was already
familiar with SharePoint. We just had to
show themsome of the different interfaces
so they could see how the new features
work. Now, end users can use the system to
get the reports that they need without any
involvement from IT.”
When the Department deployed Fusion
Core Solution, it also made an early
decision to take a deliberate, step-by-step
approach to building out the intelligence
analysis capabilities.
“We started with the banking systems that
are run by the prison. We began tracking
trends about which inmates were sending
money to—or receiving money from—
people outside of the prison,” Bass says.
This allowed the Department to identify
people outside the prison systemwho were
sending money in to multiple inmates—
sometimes even in different prisons. Based
on analysis gathered by the Fusion Core
Solution, the Department could then justify
monitoring initiatives that could lead to
formal investigations.
“We had access to this data before, but we
could not visualize it to see the patterns
and trends in a meaningful manner. By
using the Fusion Core Solution to create
dashboards, with just a couple of clicks our
analysts are able to clearly see interesting
developments. As a result, over the last two
weeks alone, we have been able to execute
11 successful confiscations and
interdictions on incidents,” Potter says.
“Now we are able to better understand the
data on mobile phones,” he says. “We can
correlate this information with the flow of
money, and the personal relationships that
interconnect inmates across the facilities
and with people outside of the correctional
facilities.”
The system effectively provides a short list
around which investigations can be
initiated, and it makes for a much more
efficient allocation of law enforcement
resources to generate a much higher rate
of success. Beyond improving the
investigative track record, the insight into
what is happening within and around the
prison system also contributes to a safer
workplace for employees and for the
prisoners themselves.

5. “We are able to see problem areas now
which we could not necessarily have
visualized before," says Ray Hobbs, Director
of Arkansas Department of Corrections.
“Over time, the analysis will make an
increasingly positive impact on the security
and safety of the prison workforce. It will
make a difference.”
Microsoft Government
Microsoft applications,solutions, and
services help to empower public servants
and government employees to share critical
information and serve their constituents
more efficiently.
For more information about Microsoft
Government please go to:
www.microsoft.com/government
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For more information about Arkansas
Department of Corrections, visit the
website at:
http://adc.arkansas.gov
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published September 2013
Software and Services
 Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010