MX3 delivers anti-gun messages at 18 Wyoming incarcertaion centers

Wyoming law enforcement turns to Keywest Technology to help target prisoners with messaging as part of national anti-firearms program.

The federal government is serious about gun crime. Convicted felons caught with a firearm during the commission of another crime automatically get five years added to their sentences.

However, if that deterrent is to work and reduce armed criminal offenses, criminals have to know about it. Enter Project Safe Neighborhoods, an initiative of U.S. Department of Justice to reduce the amount of gun crime and violence in the country.

The program, which ranks only behind combating domestic terrorism on the list of federal law enforcement priorities, sets out as one its primary goals educating the public about the penalties for using a firearm in the commission of a crime.

While most federal judicial districts have relied on billboard, TV and radio advertising to get the word out, the District of Wyoming decided to direct
its no-firearm messaging at a highly targeted audience: inmates in local and state incarceration centers.

“We wanted to hit the target audience, those in detention centers who commit felonies, with our messaging,” said Matt Mead, U.S. Attorney for the District of Wyoming. That’s vitally important to the success of Wyoming Project Guardian, the district's name for its regional Project Safe Neighborhoods implementation.

“The ultimate goal is not prosecution and jailing,” he said. “The ultimate goal is to stop crime before it happens. We want to let people in incarceration centers know the consequences of having a gun.

“They have a proclivity to commit these offenses. If they are a felon, they are not allowed to have a firearm.”

A captive audience
On the surface, the concept of playing back video announcements to prisoners to re-enforce that message seems simple. Prisoners watch television in communal areas; some even have televisions in their cells. But when the steering committee of sheriffs and chiefs of police that came up with the idea studied how it would actually get done, the complexity of the idea became apparent.

“Originally, the plan was to buy a VCR and play it,” said Ernie Johnson, owner and director of services for Johnson and Associates which coordinated the project for the district.

“But that wasn’t going to work because the administrators at the various facilities wouldn't have the time to do it.”

Charged with running large institutions, maintaining public and prisoner safety and all of the details that involves, prison administrators and jailers have weightier responsibilities than feeding tapes to a VCR and pressing play. “We needed to find a way that technology could be used to schedule playback and let it run,” he said.

“The way we figured on doing the messaging was using technology. Prisoners are a captive audience watching TV in jail. We needed technology to break into programming and pipe in a message regarding gun crimes. Keywest and Megahertz provided the system,” said Johnson.

Johnson and an associate, Chuck Bayne, identified the Keywest Technology MediaXtreme MX3 multimedia scheduler/player and some ancillary cable gear from Megahertz as the right technology to use at the 18 different local and state incarceration centers taking part in the program.

The MediaXtreme MX3
The Keywest Technology MX3 is an affordable digital signage player that controls playback of video and graphics on individual monitors, plasma display panels and LCD screens. It also can be controlled remotely via IP to playback video and graphics to an entire network of displays.

Of the 18 MX3 sites in the Wyoming federal judicial district, 15 are networked and three operate as standalone devices. Schedules and video announcements about felons carrying firearms, the consequences of using and dealing methamphetamines, spousal abuse and other messages are distributed on CD to each site, where the material is downloaded to the MX3.

The MX3 comes with an easy-to-use event queuing application called MediaScheduler. While master schedules are distributed to individual detention centers, they are often tweaked on location to allow individual facilities to insert their own messaging about site-specific topics.

The device plays back video, computer graphics and audio events that were dragged onto a timeline when the schedule was created. Schedules can be modified while the MX3 plays an existing program lineup, so there’s no program interruption.

The MX3 supports playback of Microsoft PowerPoint slides, Macromedia Flash animations, MPEG 1 and 2 video as well as AVI files. It offers picture-in-graphic capability so users can size an MPEG playback window in a background graphic, and it can be configured with a DVD player.

The Wyoming application required special filters and switching capability that allows a cable TV source to be interrupted during commercial breaks at the top and bottom of the hour so firearms messages and other PSAs from the jailers can be inserted. That’s not always easy, especially when there are 60 to 180 cable channels, each with their own commercial breaks.

“The nemesis is trying to mesh those schedules,” explained Bayne. “It’s been trial and error on a local basis. Most of the areas that ran into scheduling problems developed enough local expertise that a person has gone in and created his own schedule to take care of conflicts.”

Making a Difference
From an empirical, quantitative point of view, it’s too soon to determine whether the program has been a success. The last of the MX3 units were installed in December 2004.

U.S. attorney Mead is working with the University of Wyoming to study the impact of Wyoming Project Guardian, including the prison messaging program, but findings are years away.

However, from an anecdotal point of view, it appears that the word is getting out to felons who have seen the PSAs that if they carry a gun, they face stiff sentencing.

“Drug dealers are a group we really don’t want to have firearms,” said Tony Young, law enforcement coordinator at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Wyoming. “Some have commented that they don’t’ carry a firearm because they don’t
want five years added on. If they have a gun, they know the numbers.

“It’s not as if they are familiar with the law or the particular statutes,” he explained. “A drug dealer doesn’t say: ‘I can’t sell more than 500 grams of meth because that will get me into a mandatory maximum.’ But he did hear about the guns in prison or from a friend in prison, and he doesn’t want the five extra years.”

In addition to the detention center messaging, prosecuting offenders to the full extent is the key to succeeding, according to Young. “You can put out all of the messages that you want, but if you don’t follow through it has no meaning.
And we are following through, and they see the consequences.”

That kind of response is getting the attention of the Department of Justice. A team of DOJ evaluators visited the Wyoming district to examine how Mead’s office was doing with its implementation of the program. Their findings endorse Mead’s approach to detention center messaging.

“That team of evaluators will recommend what we are doing in the detention center as a national best practice,” said Mead.