(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in Newsmax. Autonomous Intelligence Could Mean Safer, More Effective Prisons)
Behind concrete walls and razor wire, a quiet technological revolution is underway in America’s prisons.
Autonomous AI agents are now surfacing actionable intelligence from text, audio, and video, alerting investigators, correctional staff, and law enforcement to emerging crises, prioritizing threats, and even writing and updating reports as new information arrives.
It’s happening because conservatives, and both Trump administrations, recognized that modernizing prisons through technology improves safety and health outcomes for inmates and officers alike, boosts rehabilitation and reentry, and strengthens public safety overall.
Automating labor-intensive work is critical given the severe shortage of correctional officers.
In an environment where a lapse in situational awareness can mean life or death, corrections departments can no longer afford to bury staff under paperwork and outdated protocols.
This urgency is compounded by a broader reckoning inside the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The Trump administration has championed prison reform and modernization, emphasizing rehabilitation’s role in public safety.
Implementation of the First Step Act expanded home confinement and community placement for low-risk inmates with strong reentry plans, cutting costs and recidivism, a signature Trump-era achievement.
But determining who qualifies for these programs, and doing so quickly, requires risk and predictive analyses drawn from millions of data points, scattered across antiquated, siloed systems, case histories, medical logs, visitation and mail logs, incident reports, camera feeds, and more, alongside intelligence surfaced by newer technologies monitoring authorized inmate communications.
Congress has approved $5 billion in new BOP funding for staff retention, facility upgrades, and modernization. But that funding alone cannot hire officers fast enough or modernize facilities quickly enough to match the pace of reform.
Leadership needs a way to close that gap without waiting on staffing and construction timelines.
Existing tools that mine correctional databases for intelligence tend to work in isolation, producing fragmented information.
A system that flags an assault on camera, for instance, may be blind to what that same inmate said in a phone call earlier that day about planning the attack.
What’s needed is centralized intelligence that lets distinct systems and data silos work together.
That’s exactly what a new class of platforms, led by Leo Technologies (“LeoTech”), now provides, combining legacy data with newly derived intelligence into a single analytical system.
LeoTech’s Verus AI translates and transcribes authorized inmate communications in real time across 62 languages.
Using semantic AI, it understands context well enough to surface evidence of drug and human trafficking, planned violence, witness names, confessions, and suicidal ideation, sending continuous alerts to staff. It also performs link analysis and assists in report writing.
Verus AI is used in hundreds of jails and prisons nationwide, with over 13,000 users and analyzed over five billion minutes of communications over seven years. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, the nation’s largest system, recently awarded LeoTech a five-year contract to deploy Verus.
Verus Vision AI, meanwhile, uses a facility’s existing cameras to automatically flag warning signs, prolonged isolation, distress, gang proximity, concealed weapons, unauthorized movement, or gathering crowds, alerting staff within seconds.
It also automatically counts inmates, freeing up hundreds of thousands of staff hours for more important work: finding contraband, escorting inmates to medical and rehabilitation appointments, and human engagement that improves well-being and reduces recidivism.
LeoTech’s Verus ION, an agentic AI platform, unifies these capabilities, bringing together intelligence from correctional systems and external sources.
“Verus ION brings communications intelligence, video intelligence, institutional records and relevant open-source information into a unified operational picture,” said Steven Harpe, LeoTech’s Chief Product and Technology Officer.
“Its autonomous agents continuously evaluate those signals, identify relationships, prioritize emerging risks and route actionable information to the appropriate personnel… updating alerts, assessments and reports in real time.”
Alerts reach whoever is best positioned to respond: correctional investigators, medical staff, social workers, rehabilitation coordinators, internal affairs, or outside law enforcement. Importantly, these tools aid correctional staff; they do not replace human judgment or existing personnel.
In practice, this means an officer with a tablet can receive an alert about a planned contraband delivery and search a cell at the right moment, while ION simultaneously scans news and social media for related leads.
When an inmate alleges rape, relevant video and calls can be automatically preserved and surfaced for evaluation based on timing and proximity.
Dots that once went unconnected, and might have led to an attack, are now visible in time to prevent it.
“Centralized intelligence changes how a correctional institution operates,” Harpe said. “When information moves across systems in real time, leaders gain a clearer understanding of emerging risks and staff can devote more attention to work that requires human presence, experience and judgment.”
As the Trump administration continues to push prison reform forward, technologies like Verus offer the Federal Bureau of Prisons a practical way to close the gap between ambitious policy and the on-the-ground resources needed to execute it safely, turning information into action, and action into a safer, more rehabilitative correctional system for everyone inside it.
(Editor’s Note: The preceding column does not constitute an endorsement of any product or service on the part of Newsmax.)
Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
