'Long-Term' Mainframe Outage Impacts Milwaukee County Jail

MILWAUKEE, WI — The Milwaukee County information system that serves the county jail computer system crashed this week, and repairs could take days - impacting hundreds of bookings, releases and other functions.

The system crashed Wednesday morning. IMSD’s manager, Andy Carrion, originally determined the system would be running by midnight yesterday. Today, he informed MCSO that the parts IMSD ordered did not fix the issue, and there’s a possibility for a long-term outage, which he defined as “days.”

The Plan

The Detention Bureau has implemented a plan to deal with the mainframe outages. The outage impacts all bookings and releases, which are being done manually. Jail staff need to check individually on each release with MPD, the DA’s Office and run a CCAP criminal history to determine if the inmate has any holds, new charges or warrants which would prevent their release. Holds from agencies outside of the system cannot be tracked.

Delays

Authorities have notified all affected Milwaukee County agencies that the system is not functioning properly and there may be delays with processing bookings and releases. The Milwaukee County Jail books approximately 100 inmates a day and releases about that same number.

In addition to the outage impacting bookings and releases, it also restricts phone communication between any manually booked inmates with their families, and inmate accounts which allow them to purchase commissary. Victim notification upon release of an inmate is also disconnected. Lawyer visits for inmates booked since yesterday will need to take place in person at the jail.

Questions?

The jail personnel are end users of the county executive’s computer system. MCSO does not run, operate or fix it. Questions on what is being done to repair the system should be directed to the head of IMSD, Laurie Panella, at 278-4944.

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