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Co-Author: Cindy Gallie

Visitations provide immense benefits for both incarcerated individuals and their families. From reducing inmate recidivism to improving the health and wellness of families to enabling corrections service providers, visitations represent a vital component of our correctional system’s success. But there’s a lot involved with every visitation, including safety protocols, costs, and logistics. All of that was challenging and complex enough before our current situation paralyzed the corrections system nationally. Now, as a result of this major change in the state of the world, the continuation of in-person correctional facility visitations is in jeopardy. How do we ensure this vital part of familial connectivity while keeping incarcerated people, corrections officers, and visitors safe?

Remote video conferencing offers a key solution to this challenge, allowing for the many benefits of visitations to continue. However, virtual sessions have still proven difficult for many correctional organizations, given historically siloed technology, special requirements to deploy in such environments, and compliance issues of remote participants.

Cisco Customer Experience (CX) Offer for Virtual Visitations

Virtual Visitation-Family Visiting

Cisco CX has created a purpose-built solution that overcomes the challenges of remote video conferencing. The Cisco CX offer for Virtual Visitations helps correctional institutions rapidly design, implement, and deploy a real-time voice, video, and data connectivity solution. It allows your agency to continue providing essential services even amidst today’s novel situation or any other disaster recovery (DR) situation you may encounter, man-made or by nature.

Security is always a top concern for Cisco and we know it’s of special importance for solutions serving correctional systems. Our Cisco CX offer for Virtual Visitations meets your compliance standards with a customized portal that builds in appropriate workflow checks and balances. The solution automatically starts and ends meetings, makes connections to video units, and records if appropriate, making it easy for department personnel to meet compliance guidelines and deliver inmate services.

 

Inmates, families, legal representatives, telemedicine, courts, reentry providers, and other supporting professionals and entities can all collaborate with secure real-time video conferencing. They can easily schedule meetings with role-based views and a user-friendly interface designed for correctional institutions. Utilizing Cisco Webex Meetings, smart devices and video units can be seamlessly integrated with your inmate management system, delivering features that people around the world are familiar with and have come to rely on for their continuous communications and collaboration.

Cisco CX helps you deliver a secure and scalable solution that leverages your existing network and services for greater efficiency and cost savings. Our model offers scalability and flexibility, implemented as on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid-model.

Virtual Visitation Solution

Trusted Partner to Local, State, and Federal Governments

Cisco CX understands the critical importance of keeping inmates connected with their families and support professionals, which is why our experts have created a repeatable solution capable of quick deployment. But it’s more than just meeting an immediate need to maintain business resilience and service continuity. There also needs to be the highest level of trust from a genuine partner. Cisco has a strategy and roadmap that utilizes the same secure technologies to enable virtual courtrooms and a post incarceration solution for probation, parole, and community corrections and supervision programs. We look forward to working with the leaders of state and local governments around the world to drive efficiencies, reduce recidivism, and improve our criminal justice system.

Cisco understands virtual visitation is just one component of your essential operations. We’re here for you with a special selection of additional business resiliency offers to support your mission to not just provide uninterrupted services, but enhance a safe, stable, and humane environment while promoting a secure experience throughout the delivery of these services. 

Contact a Cisco CX expert today.



Authors

Daniel Stewart

Senior Justice Advisor

Connected Justic