CALDWELL — When inmates are booked into jail, they are photographed and fingerprinted.
Now, at Canyon County Jail, a photograph will also be taken of their eyes, specifically the iris.
"The reason that's super important is because the iris, unlike a fingerprint cannot be altered,” Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue said.
Canyon County is now the first sheriff's office in Idaho to implement the BI2 technology system, an iris recognition system.
“The iris is what you're born with, right so whatever God gave you, that's what is going to show up in that scan,” Donahue said.
In less than 10 seconds, a machine will snap a photograph of a person's iris, which is then entered into a database.
That digital photo could then reveal their criminal history and the person has ever used an alias.
"Criminals try to change their appearance, try to change their identity through surgical removal of their fingerprints, burning of the fingerprints,” Donahue said.
Currently, there are 1.4 million people in the system's database.
"This is just one more tool in the toolbox that allows us to make sure that we are looking at the person, who they say they are,” Donahue said.
Inmates will be scanned when they enter and leave the jail.
"The last thing we want to do is make a mistake on the identity of someone who is leaving jail,” Donahue said.
The Canyon County Sheriff's Office told KTVB, the technology cost $10,000, but it was funded through a grant.
"The iris itself is the colored part of your eye and it's made up of unique characteristics which are tears that occur in the womb between the third and the eighth month and they tear randomly so identical twins with identical DNA have random tears,”said John Leonard, Senior Vice President of Global Business Development for BI2 Technologies.
Leonard told KTVB, iris recognition is 12 times more accurate than fingerprints.
“You have one, statistically one wrong fingerprint match out of 100,000 fingerprints taken,” Leonard said. “With a person's iris, it's 12 times that, so 1 in 1.2 million.”
The only states that don't have this technology yet are Hawaii, Alaska and Delaware.