TDCJ CTO: Network Infrastructure Aging, Needs Replacement

Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Chief Technology Officer Fred Cook indicated this week that its facilities are in dire need of network infrastructure.

“I would say one of the major challenges I’ve seen is the [network] infrastructure on those prison facilities ... some of the cabling hasn’t been updated in decades,” Cook told an audience at the Texas Association of State Systems for Computing and Communications (TASSCC) 2024 conference in Houston this week.

“So, we’re talking about a situation where we don’t even have fiber infrastructure. In some cases, that traverses the prison facility, and when I say traverses it, a prison facility is not one or two buildings, sometimes it’s 15 to 20,” he explained. “To me, that’s probably one of the steepest challenges we have to overcome.”

Building new fiber infrastructure would involve installing it across the state in multibuilding campuses and setting up network closets or rooms. Cook didn’t specify if this work will show up in the agency’s upcoming budget request, not yet online.

TDCJ manages all state prisons, jails and correctional facilities. It also provides funding and oversight of community supervision and oversees all inmates released from prison on parole or mandatory supervision. This translates to some 87 TDCJ-operated facilities with 29,951 employees, 127,690 inmates and 75,782 parolees.

Cook is the CTO and a deputy division director with infrastructure and customer support and enterprise applications oversight.

During the TASSCC panel discussion “Navigating the Future: Policy and Governance of Generative AI in Texas State Government,” Cook also touched on how AI can help law enforcement agencies. As many have found, summarizing large pools of information is one use case across government and industry.

He said that his agency had recently used an AI tool to sift through telephone calls during an investigation. With about 80,000 minutes (about two months) of inmate phone calls to go through, the unnamed tool quickly returned relevant results, relieving the TDCJ’s central intelligence of huge time constraints.

“Last fiscal year, we had almost 860 million minutes’ worth of recorded inmate phone calls. We’re on track to exceed a million minutes in the next couple of years,” he shared. “Recently, there was a high-profile [case] ... our centralized intelligence unit had to go through 80,000 minutes’ worth of inmate phone calls.

“It’s an impossible task. ... They reached out to a vendor of this new tool we implemented, and within minutes, they were able to find all relevant phone calls ... and turn them over to law enforcement. So that’s the power of these tools in collaboration.”