MactoCounting is The Holy Grail

time to read 2 min | 263 words

I might have mentioned before that Counting is somewhat important in prison. That is about as accurate as saying that you would somewhat prefer it to keep breathing. Counting is the heartbeat of the prison, the thing that the entire operation revolves around.

Here we can see the counting screen:

image

You can see that we have an Open Count here, that is a count that is still in progress. Some cell blocks have reported their counts, and some are still in the process of making the count.

A Count is Closed when we know where are the Inmates are. (When the two numbers line up properly). You probably noticed that there are two ways to report a count, the first is for Inmates who are outside the prison (court, hospital, etc). Because they are outside the prison, we track them by name. For internal counts, we don’t really care about names, just the numbers.

There is another type of a Count, a Named Count, which is a process that happen very rarely, but is usually used to reconcile what is in the computer and what is actually in the cells.

It is important to understand the “Officer in charge” field, basically, it is the guy who has the legal responsibility and is signing off on those numbers. In other words, if there is something wrong, that guy is going to take a hard fall.

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