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Counting with fingers.

Article Excerpt
In a small-town grocery store, a routine inventory is under way. Clerks move quickly among the shelves of canned goods and boxes of pasta, holding scanners in their hands, passing them over bar codes and flashing information back to the store's central database.

Down the road, in the state correctional facility, officers move among inmates "counting heads"--not just once, but several times during the course of the day. Another type of routine "inventory" is being conducted, but this one consumes much more time and resources. Soon, however, correctional officers may have access to improved technology that makes counting inmates go as quickly, smoothly and accurately as other inventory counts.

Every day, at every correctional facility across the country, correctional officers take inmate head counts. Some are conducted a few times each day; others up to a dozen times. "Until now, a manual head count has been an institution's only option," says Rob Donlin, corrections program manager at the National Institute of Justice's National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center (NLECTC)-Southeast. "If that manual count produces the correct number, everything is fine. But a problem happens if the manual count comes up short," he says. "Say that you are supposed to have 75 inmates in your cellblock and you come up with 74. The first thing you would do is count them all over again to make sure that you didn't make a counting error. If you come up with 74 again, then you know that someone is missing, but you don't...