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| County Sheriff Touts New Inmate Tracking System |
| By Washington Post |
| Published: 10/27/2003 |
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Fairfax County, Va., Sheriff Stan G. Barry (D) wants to put more criminals on the street. It's a strange position, coming from the county's chief jailer, but he says it could end up saving Fairfax millions of dollars. The criminals Barry refers to are nonviolent offenders who already are candidates for work release or other time outside the county jail. Barry's method is a global positioning system that tracks an inmate's whereabouts 24 hours a day. It is cost-free to the county, because the inmate pays for it. In addition to an ankle bracelet, already worn by prisoners in work-release or furlough programs, the prisoner must carry a large pager or a handbag-size tracking device. Both devices transmit the prisoner's position, at any point on the globe, to a satellite that relays the data to a company called ProTech Monitoring Inc. in Odessa, Fla. "This gives us a more direct picture of what a person is doing," Barry said, "rather than relying on the [required] phone calls. But the bigger reason is the cost savings. We'll be able to go from one staff person supervising 10 inmates to one person supervising up to 35 inmates. That's over $1 million [saved] a year, and the prisoners pay for the technology," which Fairfax began using last month. The county needed the help because the jail population has spiked to more than 1,200 after several years around the 1,000 mark, but budget restraints have not allowed an increase in jail staff, Barry said. Previously, inmates on work release wore an ankle bracelet and had to be home by a certain hour, when a call might be placed by a random computer program to check up. But there was no tracking where the inmate went during the day, other than to manually call job sites or other places the inmate was allowed to go. Using the active tracker, the inmate's whereabouts are visible almost instantaneously, unless he or she is underground or in a building that obscures the signal. With the passive tracker, inmates must return their pagers to a home charger, which then transmits data from that day. If there is any problem in locating the inmate, Barry said, he or she is removed from the program and returned to jail. Inmates have incentives to make sure the trackers work. They prefer to sleep at home, eat non-jail food and decide what to watch on television, Barry said. Violations set off pagers at the sheriff's office and can mean they return to 24-hour custody. Barry said a full-time inmate costs $125 a day to house and feed, or more than $45,000 a year. But the inmates pay $15 a day for a global tracking device, several dollars more than the rental rate that ProTech charges the county for the units. Switching about 22 inmates from custody to global tracking, therefore, would save the jail $1 million a year. Barry said the number in the program eventually could reach 90 or more. |
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