MactoOnce more from the top, I swear I had a few more over there
time to read 2 min | 298 words

Counting is more than just a regular event in prison, it is more like the heart beat of the entire operation. Indeed, one of the more disruptive events in a prison is when Inmates refuse to be Counted. That is ranked up there will a full scale riot.

Macto is meant to be mostly about the legal aspects of an Inmate’s incarceration, but it can’t ignore the Counting. Indeed, we need to explicitly support those. Just to make our life complicated, when Inmates are Counted, they don’t actually have to be Counted (except at Opening Count and Closing Count, of course), they just have to be Accounted For.

For example, an Inmate may be at the Courthouse during Noon Counting, and that is just fine, as long as we know that he is there. Or there might be an Inmate that is present in another cell during the day, which is also pretty common.

Any changes for the counting for Closing Count are usually pretty extraordinary, something being hospitalized, just arriving from a very long day at Court, etc.

In Macto, we need to record not only that the counting has been made, but also:

  • How many Inmates where present?
  • How many Inmates where supposed to be there?
  • If there are any discrepancies, are they accounted for?

Oh, and you can’t just not accept invalid data, because if an Inmate has Escaped, you still need to be Count all of the rest (in fact, you want to be able to Count them very quickly, nothing make sure that you’ll Count as a suspected or real Escape attempt).

Speaking of which, there is another aspect of Inmate management that we haven’t spoken about yet, the actual tracking of the inmate, but I’ll discuss that in my next post.

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More posts in "Macto" series:

  1. (17 Aug 2011) Looking at warrants
  2. (15 Aug 2011) Talking to nasty people
  3. (11 Aug 2011) Counting is The Holy Grail
  4. (10 Aug 2011) Getting Started, you never forget your first Inmate
  5. (08 Aug 2011) The Main Screen
  6. (03 Aug 2011) Warrants are for fools
  7. (01 Aug 2011) Non functional concerns, you are a legal system
  8. (28 Jul 2011) And it goes on your permanent record, too!
  9. (27 Jul 2011) Once more from the top, I swear I had a few more over there
  10. (26 Jul 2011) Day to day life
  11. (22 Jul 2011) Where is the Inmate anyway?
  12. (19 Jul 2011) Let’s CREATE an Inmate
  13. (12 Jul 2011) Creating The Model
  14. (05 Jul 2011) The boundaries of a prison
  15. (25 Jul 2009) An end to end sample