ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 28, 1995 TAG: 9512280019
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
Fingerprinting has always been a messy job at the Roanoke City Jail: Squirt the black ink on paper, spread it out with a roller, stick the prisoner's fingers in the ink, and then roll his fingers on the proper boxes on the fingerprint card.
When it's a hectic night, and you've got new prisoners who are stinking of alcohol or in a troublemaking mood, it's hard to keep the ink off yourself, much less get a decent print every time.
"When you get in a hurry, sometimes you just make mistakes," Roanoke Sheriff Alvin Hudson says.
But that won't be a problem anymore at the Sheriff's Office. Hudson's agency is jumping further into the information technology age with a new computer system that eliminates all those hassles - and the potential for smudged fingerprints.
Now the job goes like this: Enter the prisoner's name, charge and other background in the booking computer. That information comes up on a screen on the Live Scan Fingerprinting System. Then another screen on the Live Scan tells you which finger to start with.
You take the prisoner's finger and roll it over a small imaging pad.
The photo image comes up on the screen, shows you how to center it, and tells you whether it's too dark or too light. If it's not done right, you clear that print and do it again.
"It takes the guesswork out," says Hudson, who remembers how hard it was to work with poorly rolled fingerprint records back when he was a police officer in the 1950s. "We've come so far. It just blows your mind what we can do today."
In fact, Hudson says, prisoners are so wowed by the new technology that they may be less likely to cause a ruckus about getting their prints done.
Hudson's agency went on-line with the new system Dec. 19. Just three sheriff's offices in Virginia - Newport News and Henrico County are the other two - are on-line with the Live Scan. The cost of the $60,000 computer will be covered by a federal grant.
The new fingerprints are automatically sent to the Virginia State Police's computer network and, within minutes, state police can check whether they match any of the 1 million sets of prints now on file with the state.
This will help the Sheriff's Office identify people who are wanted elsewhere, find out what crimes prisoners have been previously charged with, and catch new inmates who try to lie about their names.
Eventually, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation goes on-line with its fingerprint network, the Sheriff's Office will be able to link into a nationwide database with 30 million or more sets of prints.
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART/Staff. Roanoke City Sheriff's Deputy J.W.by CNBRoberts takes fingerprints electronically on a new imaging printer.
The program cuts down on time needed to identify arriving inmates.
color.