Several years ago, Tulare County officials in California faced a difficult situation. The juvenile detention centre was overcrowded, and a new facility, at an estimated cost of $10 million, was beyond the county's means. 'We had a crisis on our hands,' says chief probation officer Larry Price. 'We were at the stage where we were releasing kids daily from our juvenile hall because we had no place to put them.' Price suggested that the county consider an electronic monitoring system, in which 'clients' wear an ankle cuff that allows them to be supervised 24 hours a day. The cost is much lower than incarceration. The county agreed and put out a request for proposals. Officials considered about 12 vendors before choosing BI Inc of Boulder, Colo. Although Tulare County originally wanted the system to handle juveniles only, the electronic monitoring program now is used to handle adults too. There are 200 adult clients and 90 juveniles on the system at present.
Bl's system, called Bl Home Escort, has several components: a transmitter, which is worn on a strap around the ankle; a receiver, which is attached to the phone in the client's home; and a back-end system using proprietary software running on a Sparcstation from Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.
The ankle transmitter, designed and assembled by Bl, sends a constant signal to the receiver on the phone. At various times during the day, the back-end system dials the client's phone (the client does not hear a ring) and checks to make sure a signal is being sent to the transmitter - that is, making sure that the person is in the house. The software is programmed to know when the offender is scheduled to be at work or some other location outside the house.
Clients give their schedules to their probation officers, who enter the information into the Bl Home Escort system. If no signal is being received when the back-end system dials the client's house, the system checks to see if the person is scheduled to be out. If so, there is no problem.
Probation officers can use a 'drive-by' version of the home receiver to keep track of clients when they are outside the house. For example, using the drive-by receiver, a probation officer can park outside the client's workplace and receive a signal to make sure they have gone to work.
If the person is supposed to be at home and the system gets no signal at the home phone, an alert is sent to probation officers, who begin a search. If a client cuts the strap that holds the transmitter to the ankle, an alert is sent out immediately.
'About 3 per cent of the people have tried to violate the program,' Price says. 'There were a few who tried to escape But I can't think of any that we haven't gotten back into custody.'
For juveniles, the cost of electronic home monitoring is $10 a day, compared to $100 a day to keep them in a juvenile hall. For adults, the cost of a bed in jail is $40 a day. The cost of electronic home monitoring is almost nothing, because adults pay $12 a day to be in the programme
'In essence, they're paying for our equipment,' Price says. 'The budget for our 200 adult units is about $700,000 a year, for the cost of the equipment and the cost of staff to operate it. And we're recouping almost all of that $700,000 from people paying to be on the system.'
Authorities can't charge juveniles to be on the electronic home monitoring system. But corrections officials are lobbying to have the law changed, and Price says that in a year or two he expects to be able to charge the parents of juveniles who use the program. The budget for 90 juveniles this year will be $500,000, Price says.
Looking ahead, Price hopes to expand the adult program to handle as many as 800 people. 'This county needs to build 500 more jail beds,' he says. 'But if instead we build a very big electronic home-monitoring system then we could get into some real cost savings, some very big cost avoidance. That's what we're moving toward.'
Depending on how much agencies charge, they can actually use their electronic monitoring systems to make money, says David Page, vice president of marketing a Bl. 'If they want to, they can establish a profit centre,' he says. 'It's possible for them to do that.'
In Tulare County, not all prisoners are eligible for electronic home monitoring. Drug dealers, people who've used guns to commit a crime, and people who've committed violent crimes are ineligible.
Community response has been positive. 'Central California is a pretty conservative area, a real lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key kind of place,' Price says, 'but actually the program has gone over terrifically.' Part of the reason may be that the electronic home-monitoring system helps the county keep dangerous criminals in jail longer.
'Before we had this system, we were cluttering up our jails with minor offenders who just couldn't make their bail,' Price says. 'You'd have someone with three or four petty thefts who couldn't make his $2,000 bail taking up a bed for 60 days, and meanwhile you'd have to let someone who was doing time for a serious robbery or violent crime go home.'
Tulare County officials are planning several enhancements to the system. One is a 24-hour house-arrest system, to be used with convicts who have only 60 days left on their sentences. To free up jail space, these prisoners will serve their last two months at home.
Another enhancement that Price would like to implement is to use electronic home monitoring to augment traditional probation arrangements. 'So far, the idea of electronic home monitoring has only been positioned as an alternative to jail,' Price says, 'but it could also be a good tool in the probation system.'
The system has not been glitch-proof, however. The early version of the ankle transmitters were too big and bulky, for example. Bl refined the transmitters, making them smaller and more contoured. Another problem was that the early version of the receiver had openings that let bugs - the crawly kind - take up residence.
'We'd pick up the unit to get it ready for the next user, and the thing would have cockroaches in it,' Price says. 'So Bl redesigned it to be roach-proof.'
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