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No Escape
Published September 23, 2007
SEGUIN — In their jobs as juvenile probation officers, Carlton Fortson and Kelley Tomlin oversee some of the county’s worst juvenile offenders — including those who commit sex offenses or violent crimes — in “intensive supervision probation.”
One of the tools of their trade — the ankle monitor — has come into the 21st Century, and their jobs are about to get a little more high-tech.
Ankle monitors in both adult and juvenile probation in Guadalupe County are nothing new. Juvenile probation has had more than a dozen of them for years, and regularly employs them to restrict some high-risk probationers to home. Those units require a dedicated phone line and only provide authorities with information on violations after the fact, generally by fax in a day or so from the monitor vendor.
Beginning in about one month, Guadalupe County Juvenile Probation will begin to employ a next-generation device called a “TrackerPAL.”
The department has four of the units, which will be leased out at a rate of $8 per day of use — double what the county pays for monitoring its less-capable existing system, which it will continue to use for lower-risk probationers.
Manufactured by Utah-based SecureAlert Inc., the device, locked onto a Kevlar strap said to take up to five hours to cut with conventional tools, is designed to provide the probation department with real-time information about the wearer. It is “smart” enough to set sophisticated probation parameters, such as restricting access to specific neighborhoods or buildings.
It will vibrate, warning a youth that he is going out of compliance with his probation conditions — at the same time notifying SecureAlert’s PAL Monitoring Center that a violation is occurring. It will enable a probation officer to immediately call the client to discuss what is going on, and its Geographic Information Systems technology tells the officer where the wearer is.
Thursday’s decision by the Guadalupe County Juvenile Board to authorize adding the new system came after a two-week trial test conducted by Fortson and Tomlin in which Tomlin, a veteran probation officer, got to see life on the other side of the tracks.
“I was the juvenile, and Carleton was my probation officer,” Tomlin said.
She wore the device, and Fortson tracked her over the Internet on his office PC by her GIS coordinates.
On Fortson’s computer screen was a map of the Western Hemisphere. He could zoom down from North America to Texas and further — to Seguin and specific neighborhoods.
He could plot Tomlin’s movements through a series of points throughout the day.
By clicking on any particular place on the map, he could tell when Tomlin had arrived, how long she had been there, where she had gone when she’d left and how fast she had traveled between points.
Fortson nodded at the map on the screen, which traced Tomlin’s path on a recent test run.
“With the system we’ve been using, there’s no flexibility. You have to stay near the monitor, and if you don’t, I wait for a report that comes by fax,” he said. “With this, it’s right here on the computer. And if I need to go right into court with the information, I can print it out in real time.”
As part of the recent test, Tomlin was encouraged by SecureAlert staff to employ various tricks she has encountered over her six years as a probation officer to see how the system stacked up.
She tried most everything except attempting to cut off the monitor, which also warns the monitoring center if a probationer tries to cut the band, if it is submerged in water (showers are fine) or if the battery isn’t replaced so authorities can call to discuss the issue.
“When we planned the test, they told me to be rebellious,” she said of the vendor. “They told me to try to push the monitoring center.”
So Tomlin could see how the device would work, she needed to set an “out-of-bounds” area. She chose her mother’s house, and when she next visited, produced the expected result.
“I hadn’t been there a minute when it started vibrating,” she said.
Then, the “monitors” can decide, from pre-programmed options set by the probation department, what will happen next.
If the probationer immediately gets back in compliance, no harm, no foul.
If not, the monitoring center can choose to contact the offending probationer by phone — the microphone in the device is powerful enough to pick up speech even from its location at the ankle and the speaker is loud enough to get an offender’s attention or even sound a siren so searchers can find him — or can contact the probation officer so he or she can make the contact. It can even be done by conference call between the offender, the monitoring center and the probation department, 24/7.
The monitoring center, a probationer’s first line of contact with the authorities if he or she is out of bounds or there is some other problem, would first contact Tomlin, and in even, matter-of-fact tones, inform her she was violating the conditions.
Then, Fortson comes into the picture, and if necessary, on-line, which he also did, to test how the system would work.
He knew he’d have to stay right on Tomlin, and that’s what he did.
“I told her, ‘Do it now!’ or she’d be going to detention,” he joked.
Both said they were very impressed. The device has just about everything except a camera and an mp3 player.
“This device has a phone — it’s like a cell phone — and a GIS tracking system all in one,” Fortson said. “With this, the kid or parent doesn’t need a house phone. We can do it with this because it’s also a phone.”
It will be a much more useful system, he said, for kids who have difficulty abiding by the conditions of probation, have to be compelled to attend school or ordered to stay clear of their victims.
An option, he noted, allows victims to be contacted if the offender gets too close to them.
Tomlin said she believed the system would prove invaluable, as it has in Comal County and at Guadalupe County Adult Probation, where the system is already in use.
“Compared to what we have now, there just is no comparison,” Tomlin said. “This is the top of the line — especially for our high-risk offenders.”
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