The Keyword Monitoring module provides automated, continuous scanning of all inmate electronic communications — including outgoing messages, email correspondence, and messaging app text — against facility-defined keyword and phrase libraries. Administrators configure monitoring lists by navigating to the Keyword Monitoring tab and clicking Manage Keywords. The keyword editor supports plain text terms, multi-word phrases, and pattern-based expressions, and allows administrators to group keywords into categories such as gang terminology, contraband codes, escape planning language, PREA-related terms, and threat language. Each category can be assigned a severity level (low, medium, high, critical) that determines how the system routes alerts when a match is detected.
When the scanning engine detects a keyword match in an inmate communication, it immediately generates a hit record visible in the Keyword Monitoring queue. Each hit record displays the matched keyword or phrase, the communication type and date, the inmate’s name and booking number, and a context excerpt showing the surrounding text. Staff can click View Full Communication to open the complete message or call transcript in a dedicated reader panel, with the matched term highlighted in amber. From the hit detail view, the officer can dismiss the hit with a documented reason, create a SAR directly from the hit record, or escalate to a supervisor — all with a single click from the action buttons at the bottom of the detail panel.
The module maintains a comprehensive hit history organized by keyword category, inmate, and date range. Intelligence supervisors can use the hit history to identify communication pattern changes for specific inmates over time — for example, determining whether an inmate has recently begun using new coded terminology consistent with gang recruitment activity. The hit history is filterable by housing unit, classification level, and keyword category, making it practical for facilities with large inmate populations to focus monitoring resources on the highest-risk segments. Keyword lists can be updated at any time without interrupting ongoing monitoring, and list version history is preserved so administrators can document what terminology was active during any specific monitoring period.
Keyword Monitoring integrates directly with the NEMO Intelligence engine, which applies contextual analysis to flagged communications to reduce false positives. Rather than simply counting keyword occurrences, NEMO evaluates the communication as a whole, considering factors such as the inmate’s behavioral history, known associations, and the frequency and pattern of the flagged terms. This contextual scoring means that an inmate writing a letter that happens to contain a monitored word in a clearly benign context will receive a different risk weight than an inmate using the same term alongside other indicators of threat planning. The system’s sensitivity and specificity settings are configurable by administrators to calibrate the balance between detection coverage and review workload. All monitoring activity, keyword list changes, and hit dispositions are logged in the audit trail in support of both internal oversight and external compliance reviews.