February 18th, 2011
Earlier this legislative session, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia re-introduced the National Criminal Justice Commission Act (NCJCA). It’s an important first step for addressing the problems with the criminal justice system. This commission will be tasked with the monumental effort of recommending concrete recommendations to reduce the number of individuals in our prisons and look for alternatives to protect the public, while offering rehabilitative and restitution opportunities.
According to the BJS (Bureau of Justice Statistics), more than 2.3 million men and women are in prisons throughout the U.S. Although our incarceration rate is the highest in the world, more than half of all people released from U.S. prisons re-enter the system within three years.
The NCJCA is currently supported by 20 Senators and has widespread bipartisan support. The NCJCA was passed by the House of Representatives during the previous legislative session, the 111th Congress, but was not brought to the Senate Floor.
It’s time to make a huge effort to pass the NCJCA in 2011. The experts and stakeholders that will be on the Commission can provide an important road map for the future of our criminal justice system. Please contact the U.S. Capital Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Senator/Representative. You can also search online to find out who represents you in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and contact them. Express your support for S. 306 and make the 112th Congress the year NCJCA is enacted.
Tags: alternatives to incarceration, criminal justice, evidence-based practices, offender rehabilitation, reducing jail population
Posted in Industry, Innovation, Legislative | No Comments »
February 7th, 2011
BluTag GPS Monitoring Device
One of our customers in California uses GPS monitoring technology to help reduce its jail population while maintaining a high level of public safety and enrollee accountability. The level of success this Sheriff’s Office experiences with its GPS monitoring program is due in large part to the flexibility each supervising officer is afforded to help set up enrollees for success while ensuring accountability. Additionally, the supervising officers are armed, sworn law enforcement officers, which allows them to immediately bring in an enrollee in violation of his/her program. Read more about this successful program by clinking here.
Tags: alternatives to incarceration, GPS monitoring, gps tracking, High enrollee accountability, innovative GPS monitoring technology, Maintain public safety, offender rehabilitation, satellite tracking of people, Successful GPS monitoring program, Tracking Sucess
Posted in Equipment, Innovation | No Comments »
February 1st, 2011
Stalker Alert, a victim notification device
January 2011 was the eighth observance of National Stalking Awareness Month. This designation resulted from the diligent work of the National Center for Victims of Crime to increase awareness of stalking and its prevelence. According to the Stalking Resource Center, 3.4 million people who are of the age of 18 are staked each year, and 3 in 4 victims are stalked by someone they know. STOP worked hard to develop Stalker Alert, a product to notify victims of the presence of known stalkers.
Stalker Alert provides 24-hour advanced notice to a victim regarding the presence of the accused stalker no matter where the victim is located at the time. Previous systems relied on exclusion zones, or prohibited areas for the stalker, around the victim’s home, work and other designated locations. But notification did not occur if the victim went outside of these fixed locations. With Stalker Alert, a victim can resume her normal routine while having the ability to receive advance notice about the presence of the known stalker so she can implement her safety plan.
 For more important information about stalking, visit www.stalkingawarenessmonth.org.
Tags: advance notification, criminal justice, domestic violence, mobile zones, stalker alert, stalking, victim notification, victims of stalking
Posted in Equipment, domestic violence | No Comments »
December 22nd, 2010
One of our customers in Florida uses GPS monitoring technology to help reduce its jail population, which results in lower the overall costs for operating the jail. There’s a link to the case study describing the agency’s success and approach to GPS supervision and the benefits it has realized in a short period of time. There are more like this and I’ll share them in 2011.
I look forward to discussing the exciting projects and products STOP is developing for 2011. I’m sure all of you will benefit from the suggestions that you and your fellow STOP system users have made.
Case Study St-Lucie County Pretrial, Florida
Tags: alternatives to incarceration, GPS monitoring, innovative GPS monitoring technology, offender rehabilitation, reducing jail population
Posted in Equipment, Industry, Innovation | No Comments »
December 9th, 2010
Dennis Doffing, STOP’s national sales manager for service providers, writes the following post on Evidence-Based Practices. Thanks, Dennis, for sharing your knowledge with our readers.
At our 2010 Training Institutes we offered a session on EBP as it pertains to GPS monitoring. Because the use of GPS in community supervision settings has grown swiftly, we sometimes don’t think about how to fully utilize the available tools to generate the needed data for EBP documentation.. You can use our products for more than tracking to/from home and work. VeriTracks has a number of options for use in an EBP environment. Examples include using:
- Silent Inclusion Zones to monitor attendance and duration at key counseling and rehabilitation meetings. Listing AA meeting locations, outpatient treatment address, etc. as zones gives you an easy way to see if enrollees went and how long they stayed.
- Silent Exclusion Zones to map out undesirable places, such as known drug areas, gang houses or areas of interest, to show if enrollees visited that location without requiring you to respond in real time to an alert. You can determine if a random drug test is in order or if the enrollees merely drove by the location on the way to work or some other approved location.
- Caseload or Agency-wide summary reports such as Enrollee Events Summary Table or Notification Summary by Event Type can assist in determining where you to focus attention to reduce events and improve overall program performance. Both are among the more than 100 online reports in VeriTracks Reports tab.
- The Reasoncode consistently applied when un-enrolling an enrollee provides you with better data over time when reviewing how and why people leave your program. Taking this extra step also helps better define and provide a benchmark of success for you, your program and the enrollees.
All of our end-users know what they need in their particular area of expertise and application of STOP equipment in their programs. If you are using VeriTracks and STOP’s products to assist in your own evidence-based practices please share your ideas in the comments section. We all learn from the combined pool of knowledge!
Tags: alternatives to incarceration, EBP, evidence-based practices, GPS monitoring, gps tracking, offender rehabilitation, satellite tracking of people, veritracks
Posted in Equipment, Industry, evidence-based practices | No Comments »
November 29th, 2010
STOP continually looks for ways to help our customers run the best electronic monitoring programs. One best practice option that can help establish consistent management of events is using the services offered by our Monitoring Center.
We offer our own Monitoring Center, which is staffed 24/7/365 with skilled technicians who receive event alerts (or notifications) and manages events based on the agency’s protocols. Agency instructions for managing events and violations are called protocols.
These instructions are input into the Monitoring Center widget in VeriTracks and displayed for our staff members to follow for every type of event or violation we manage for an agency. For example, if an enrollee generates a low battery alert, an agency may want our Monitoring Center technicians to manage the event by instructing the enrollee to attach the charging coupler to the bottom of BluTag. If an enrollee violates an exclusion zone, the agency may want our technicians to call the local police department so immediate action can be taken.
Protocols can also include details such as if an enrollee doesn’t respond to a telephone call within 30 minutes of violating an inclusion zone, an escalation tree, which is set up in advance by the agency, begins.
By leveraging STOP’s experience and 24/7 operations, large and small agencies can operate an efficient community supervision program. Let your account manager know how we can help.
Tags: gps tracking, manage events, manage violations, Monitoring Center, monitoring services, receive alerts, satellite tracking of people, tracking maps
Posted in Accountability, Cost saving, Equipment, Industry | No Comments »
November 18th, 2010
The time has come for all aspects of the criminal justice system to be reviewed and reevaluated. The United States simply can’t afford to continue warehousing criminals. Each offender should be evaluated for appropriate placement based on criminal history, psychological state, support structure and available resources. However, the lack of available resources shouldn’t be an additional punishment to those needing them. It should be the obligation of our government to provide options to courts and supervision agencies to reintegrate an offender back into society. I am not delusional in thinking all offenders can be rehabilitated. There are some offenders who should be offered the most stringent punishment available for their crimes.
As researchers continue to study and evaluate alternatives to incarceration, more agencies need to take that next step and put those findings into practice. How can STOP help with these next steps? What can we do to help integrate supervision strategies into everyday agency activities? Let’s start that discussion now.
Tags: alternatives to incarceration, criminal justice, offender rehabilitation, satellite tracking of people
Posted in Accountability, Cost saving, Industry, Innovation, Legislative | No Comments »
November 12th, 2010
Last month an electronic monitoring vendor experienced a prolonged system outage. Such events have affected many of the best technology companies in the world, including Blackberry, Twitter and Facebook. All of these reliable, reputable technology companies have had their systems go down unexpectedly at one time or another. At Satellite Tracking of People, we work hard to avoid system outages.
To start, we architected VeriTracks with layers of redundancy. Our system is scaled horizontally in each of our Data Centers, which means individual components of the system, such as a power unit, a server or a cooling unit, can fail without impacting the entire system. Any one component can go down, yet the system will continue running normally. Our Data Centers are geographically separated, which allows us to quickly restore operations at the second site should the first one experience a catastrophic failure.
We also have an extensive monitoring system proactively watching the system’s operations. We have more than 1,000 individual monitors checking all aspects of system operations. Our monitors report everything from available storage space, the number of BluTag devices and BluHome units calling in at any given time, to the health of each individual server and the data storage disk. Because these monitors notify our staff of instances of exceeded thresholds early on, appropriate actions can be taken 24/7 to avoid a major system issue.
Our systems are designed with high availability and robust monitoring. We routinely test the system’s response capability to catastrophic situations and third parties double check our work. Recently our entire software system successfully passed an independent security assessment in accordance with the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Pub 800-53. This assessment reviews and analyzes the management, operational and technical safeguards or countermeasures prescribed for an information system to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the system and its information.
No vendor or agency wants an experience similar to what happened last week. But we realize it may have created some question in your mind about what STOP does to prevent such an occurrence. We wanted to share with you our daily routine to prevent such a catastrophic event and how we ensure that you can always access your monitoring data.
Tags: Data Center, GPS monitoring, layered redundancy, proactive monitoring, satellite tracking, satellite tracking of people, system functionality, system memory capacity, system monitors, system security
Posted in Equipment, Industry | No Comments »
September 23rd, 2010
Many of you may have noticed a new tagline for STOP, Tracking Success. The rollout of our tagline is an important step toward actively communicating our commitment to you, our customers, and your clients.
Tracking Success takes on many meanings for STOP. The obvious correlation is our products and how they provide the best tracking, which in turn creates higher levels of client accountability and community safety and, ultimately, resulting in successful programs. But our tagline also shows STOP’s commitment to the success of your clients. VeriTracks includes many functions that can help you effectively track clients and their successful completion of a monitoring or community supervision program.
Also, using GPS or RF monitoring has shown better compliance by clients, allowing for more success in their lives as well. We want to highlight these successes and show how our products and services make your people and programs successful. A major initiative for our 2010 Training Institute was the introduction of evidence-based practices using our products and services. This was only the fist step in showing participating agencies how to highlight their successes with GPS and RF monitoring.
Tracking Success and its correlations will take on a more prominent role in our communications with you. Our tagline is part of STOP employees email signatures, marketing materials, web site and most pieces distributed to current and future customers. Its prominence in our communications allows us to reinforce our commitment to success programs, customers and clients.
Tags: customers, GPS monitoring, satellite tracking of people, system functionality, Tracking, Training Institute, veritracks
Posted in Accountability, Cost saving, Equipment, evidence-based practices | No Comments »
September 2nd, 2010
Similar to the Company tag line, Tracking Success, our recent Training Institutes continued a track record of success perhaps more successful than in the past because of using a new format. Over 70 agencies gathered in San Diego, California, and Chicago, Illinois, to learn more about our products and services. And, most important to me, the attendees provided valuable feedback on our products and services, so can make sure they meet our customers’ needs.
During the day-and-a-half conference, I learned so much more about you, our customers, including how you use our systems and how STOP may meet all of your electronic monitoring needs. The sessions focusing on our future releases and the necessary specifics to ensure your own Tracking Success were insightful and provided STOP with a clearer road map for new and enhanced functionality.
I hope the new contacts you made with fellow colleagues and peers during our evening activities lead to a valuable resource for bouncing ideas off of, collaborating and problem solving. Of course our STOP staff members are available at anytime to discuss your programs, but I realize some of you need additional information from fellow agencies to better utilize our products and services.
Our staff members at the Institutes were energized and pleased with the outcome and look forward to following-up and implementing your suggestions in future products and service s. Please remember: we want to hear from you any time you have an issue or a comment. My phone number and email address are always available.
Tags: customer feedback, customers, education, GPS monitoring, system functionality, Tracking Sucess, Training Institute
Posted in Innovation, evidence-based practices | No Comments »
Earlier this legislative session, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia re-introduced the National Criminal Justice Commission Act (NCJCA). It’s an important first step for addressing the problems with the criminal justice system. This commission will be tasked with the monumental effort of recommending concrete recommendations to reduce the number of individuals in our prisons and look for alternatives to protect the public, while offering rehabilitative and restitution opportunities.
