A secure web based records management system for prisons: a case of Kisoro prison in Uganda

Abstract

Most Prisons in the developing countries are still using the traditional system – pen and papers, to keep track of their records. This system takes long to finish a single transaction; this has led to loss of information of some cases (crimes files), insecurity and data redundancy. Similarly, some cases have been reported where some prison staff connives with clients (victims) to change and hide some information or files hence leading to compromising the evidence of the matter. This has consequently resulted in time wastage to handle cases, increased corruption and insecurity of important files hence making the whole process costly. Also when reports are needed especially about prisoners, it takes a long time and therefore makes it hard for Prison Management to take urgent decisions. This has created a lot of loopholes in the system because there is no tracking and/or monitoring of the information available in the different Departments and there are no security measures in place to safe guard the available information. This necessitated automating the system to make it more efficient and effective. There was close study of the existing manual file based system that was in use, it was compared to the proposed system. A prototype of a proposed system was developed to ease data access, security and retrieval for instant report production by the prison management. The prototype was developed using MySql database, PHP, CSS, JavaScript and HTML.