Hello Everyone,
First I would like to introduce myself. My name is Greg Braddam and I currently am with the Walton County Sheriff's Office Jail Division. Prior to that I was with the Florida Department of Corrections for 13 years, and have now been in this field for 30 years. About 10 years ago my Major (at the time) discovered that I also had a long history of working with multiple technologies. At that time I was asked to assist in overhauling our security camera system, which led to me eventually overseeing all things technology related in the Jail. Part of that included inmate services such as our television system.
At the time we were still using tube type tvs and we didn't allow inmates to have remotes. On top of that, the tvs were mounted about 8ft from the floor. This led to the tvs receiving damage from inmates using anything they could find to reach the buttons, or they would boost each other to reach the buttons, which would result in injuries from being dropped.
I came up with the idea to disassemble the tvs and add wires that allowed me to mount a control box to the wall that had buttons for the tv functions. This has worked very well for us up until recently, but it has become almost impossible to find tvs that are "dumb" anymore. With that, I am looking at a complete replacement of our tv distribution system and I wanted to see what other agencies have as their solution. As of now, I am leaning toward a hospitality type system, similar to what hotels and hospitals use, but I have no background with those. My goal is to provide services to the inmate population, but prevent them from accessing any smart tv features such as Youtube, etc. Another feature we would like to have is the ability to use the tv system as a information bulletin board with the ability to force that to be displayed at certain times during the day. We already can control the power to the tvs via our door controls system, but that is a power on or off feature, and I would like to be able to have the bulletin board system displayed during times that normal tv is restricted (counts, etc.).
I look forward to hearing everyone's input on this. Please forgive me if I am slow to respond, as they keep me very busy.