Soon, community corrections officers in Tennessee will have a new set of tools to use to better track sex offenders.  But the battle over who will supply the GPS technology, which will make its debut there some time this year must be settled first.

Last year, the state legislature authorized $2.5 million for an offender monitoring pilot project, which will use cutting edge GPS technology to keep a closer eye on sex offenders in some areas of the state.

"We looked at it as an initiative that has many potential benefits to the state down the line," said Rep. Rob Briley, D-Nashville, who sponsored the bill in the House.  "[GPS] is a good tool that probation officers and corrections officers can use when someone is released from incarceration to monitor them and keep tabs on them."

After state legislators appropriated money for the project, they left it up to the state Board of Probation and Parole as to how to implement it.

"We looked at several different things, [including] where we had a big concentration of offenders that met the criteria set out in the legislature," said Bo Irvin, of the board's division of Field Services.  "We looked at areas that we had really good partnerships with law enforcement agencies because they are going to have to respond to alerts."

Additionally, Irvin explained, the board considered the effects of implementing the program in rural, mountainous areas or metro areas with skyscrapers, where the technology may not function properly because of blocked signals.

After weighing these different factors, the board decided to include several counties in the pilot project, including Shelby, Davidson, Knox, Sullivan, Bradley, Polk, Meigs, Rutherford and Montgomery.

With all of these areas participating, Irvin said, nearly half of the 1,300 sex offenders in the state who qualify for the program are expected to be tracked by GPS once it is up and running.

But a challenge from one of the vendors who bid on the project has stalled it in its tracks.  Originally, both legislators and the board had anticipated that GPS tracking would begin during the last week in January, but Satellite Tracking of People, LLC (STOP), a Nashville-based technology company, protested the first bidding process.

According to reports, STOP raised the issue that Sentinel Offender Services, the company Irvin said had the highest rated proposal, did not meet certain state requirements regarding the vendors' level of experience.

Because of STOP's challenge to the board's intent to award the contract to Sentinel, the board is now back to square one and in the process of developing a new request for proposals.  Irvin hopes that the second RFP will be ready for vendors to bid on within the next few months.

One company that will vie for the Tennessee contract once again is Florida-based Pro Tech Monitoring, which provides GPS tracking technology to other states, including Oklahoma.

"We are far and away the leader in GPS technology in the criminal justice field," said Steve Chapin, Pro Tech's CEO.  "We feel very strongly that our product is right [for Tennessee]."

But while Pro Tech prepares to re-bid on Tennessee's pilot project, the company is also contending with another issue: a lawsuit filed against the company by STOP on February 1.  According to a STOP press release, the federal complaint alleges that Pro Tech's CrimeTrax system infringes on a patent, which STOP obtained when it purchased a similar crime scene correlation system, VeriTracks, from General Dynamics in January.

"We view that as a somewhat of a frivolous lawsuit," said Chapin.  "We feel very strongly that we have [intellectual property] rights to CrimeTrax for a variety of legal reasons."

While the vendors spar with one another and the bidding process gets rolling again, officials in Tennessee are taking the unexpected delay as an opportunity to firm up their expectations for this pilot project.

According to Briley, the fact that the project has hit this setback may prove to be beneficial to the state in the end.  Recently, he said, some legislators took a trip to Georgia to see how their GPS tracking program is run and learn about some of the problems that state has encountered. 

"We learned a lot by going to Georgia," Briley said.  "Hopefully, that will make our system better than it would be otherwise."

According to Briley, by taking the trip to Georgia, decision-makers in Tennessee got a better handle on the specifics of what they were looking for in a technology provider.

"I think we could probably do a better job [of making] sure that these vendors that are bidding are capable of giving us an active and passive system, the technology is as good as it can be in sense and that we have some crime scene correlation along with that," Briley said.

Both Briley and Irvin are in agreement that, although the program is slower to get off the ground than they had initially anticipated, they do not mind waiting an extra couple of months for a higher quality project.

"I'm not too torn up about it," Briley said.  "I think we need to get it as right as we can to begin with."

Irvin agrees.

"We're committed to doing this right the first time, so we'll take whatever time it needs and we feel like the legislature supports us in that," Irvin said.

Resources:

Board of Probation and Parole Field Services (615) 741-2107

Rep. Briley (615) 650-6531 or rep.rob.briley@legislature.state.tn.us

STOP www.stopllc.com

Pro Tech www.ptm.com

Sentinel Offender Services www.sentrak.com