Bridging the gap between Police and Prisons

Over 150,000 offenders are released annually from prison in England and Wales. As a consequence of today's packed prisons, prisoners are frequently moved between prisons and a large number are released on early release schemes.

Since PINS was first deployed in 2004, we have worked hand in hand with its police customers to continually develop and enhance PINS capabilities. The success of this working relationship has enabled us to provide regular upgrades to the PINS system.

In 2007 Her Majesty Prison Service (HMPS) agreed a data sharing agreement with the police services that resulted in the electronic provision of national prison data. This in turn led to a major upgrade of the PINS system. Since then, PINS runs on the secure police networks and automatically downloads current prison data on a nightly basis.

These enhancements have resulted in immediate benefits for all system users, including the various prison intelligence units who can now focus more proactively on gathering intelligence rather than dealing with routine location enquiries.

42 UK law enforcement agencies and Police Services have since teamed up with Saadian to deploy the PINS system. In 2010 the NPIA agreed a four year national framework agreement for provision of PINS to all law enforcement agencies in the UK.

PINS is now being launched in the United States where 13 million offenders are released from US correction facilities every year.

At any one time approximately 40% of all prolific offenders are in prison. For offender managers, the up-to-date location of prolific offenders during their prison sentence is vital to their continued management. PINS provides this essential information and pro-actively alerts offender managers about upcoming releases. This enables offender managers to work with other agencies to ensure the right services are ready thereby improving post release service provision.

A key benefit of PINS is its ability to link prison data to other sources of data. A natural step has been incorporate data from local enforcement agencies. Each night this data is automatically checked against the changing prison population to ensure enforcement is more effective. This proactive checking facility has recently been commended in Sir Ian Magee's Home Office Review of Criminality Information.