IN- GPS pilot project for sex offenders ends

Corrections official had hoped for more time before money ran out for program.

5-30-2008 Indiana:

SOUTH BEND — A pilot program that provides global positioning system monitoring of local sex offenders on parole has ended a month earlier than expected.

Susan Hancock, director of the St. Joseph County Community Corrections, says she had been told by Department of Correction officials that the program, which was a joint effort with the local state parole office, would end June 30 because there was no more money for it.

The end of the GPS program does not affect services provided to local sex offenders through Project Roots, a separate program administered by Community Corrections that includes money for counseling, housing and assessments.

Hancock had a plan to wind down the GPS monitoring. She outlined that plan last week at a Community Corrections Advisory Board meeting.

She planned to accept no one new into the program after this week and to collect the monitoring devices from participants by June 30.

However, on Tuesday, Hancock received an e-mail from the local parole office telling her the monitoring units needed to be collected by Thursday.

So all the local participants were contacted and turned in their GPS units Tuesday.

“What concerns me is that is 30 extra days they could have been monitored and there could have been a smoother transition,” Hancock said.

“I really was caught off-guard. No one had contacted me, and I was very frustrated,’ she added.

Douglas Garrison, a DOC spokesman, blamed the communication issues on the bureaucracy of the DOC and the need to return the GPS units to the vendor.

As it turned out, after all the units were collected in St. Joseph County, the deadline was extended from Thursday to mid-June. That did no good for the local program, Hancock said.

Those running the 15-month pilot program liked it, despite its rocky end.

Started in February 2007, a total of 57 paroled sex offenders took part in the program in St. Joseph County. The community corrections program received $7 per day to supervise an average of 20 a month. The program took in more than $50,000 through March.

Funding came from a one-time federal grant that ran out, said Garrison, noting the program was extended for a few months.

With the DOC’s already over-stretched budget, there were no state funds available to continue it, Garrison said.

“It was a nice additional tool to have,” said Douglas Huyvaert, local parole office supervisor.

Along with St. Joseph County, a similar GPS pilot program was run in Howard County, he said.

One of the major benefits of the GPS system, Huyvaert said, was that it gave the parole agent information right away whenever a parolee entered an exclusion zone.

The exclusion zones are those areas within 1,000 feet of a school, day care or park.

The parole agent could make an immediate contact with the offender and also verify if the person was just passing through the area in a vehicle, Huyvaert said.

The GPS monitoring was added on to the extra supervision that sex offenders on parole already received, Huyvaert said. Those remain in place now that the GPS program is ended.

Supervision for sex offenders includes, for the first month, weekly visits to the parole office or in the home by a specially trained parole agent.

After that, if all is going well, the in-person contacts will be at least biweekly, Huyvaert said.

Offenders determined by a court to be predators may have more supervision.

Huyvaert did not immediately have data on how many GPS notifications would have resulted in technical violations of the offenders’ parole when compared with the cases without it.

Whether the notification would result in a violation would depend on each individual’s situation, he added.

One purpose of the pilot program, according to Garrison, was to test and determine the worthiness of GPS supervision because of a law to go into effect in 2009 that would mandate GPS monitoring of certain sex offenders.

“It’s going to be required in a year,” he said, “so it’s a good idea to learn some about the capacity and costs.”

Data from the pilot project will be shared with state officials and legislators, Garrison said, to help them move forward with any changes that might be needed.

Hancock said she still is interested in seeing if there is more grant money available to restart a similar program, but so far, nothing has come to fruition.

“I wish we could have had more time” she added, still lamenting the early end of the GPS program. ..News Source.. by Marti Goodlad Heline