The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

By Chris Lewis, clewis@nashvillecitypaper.com
January 19, 2005

Having put in time behind desks in the private prison industry, a couple of seasoned corrections veterans have turned their sights toward the heavens.

The founders of Nashville-based STOP have tapped Global Positioning System (GPS), the satellite technology that allows tracking of automobiles through products such as OnStar, to provide a new approach to the nation's growing prison overpopulation problem.

STOP - or Satellite Tracking of People - claims to have the only one-piece GPS device that tracks the whereabouts of released offenders. The BluTag product is being marketed to federal, state and local corrections officials as a cost-saving alternative to incarceration.

"It costs $70 a day to lock somebody up, and it costs $10 a day to do this technology," said Steven Logan, STOP's chief executive officer. "Our view is there is a huge population of offenders who are not just on parole or probation but also who are incarcerated who are very eligible for this type of monitoring."

As former executive of a private prison company, Cornell Companies Inc., Logan had competed for many years with Doctor R. Crants, founder of Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America.

Having left their respective companies, the former competitors, along with other corrections industry veterans, teamed up to develop a system that combines satellite tracking of offenders with a crime scene correlation program.

With two key acquisitions last month, STOP gained control of the patents on its two primary product lines. It purchased the Verquis subsidiary from Strategic Technologies Inc., which developed the BluTag product, the one-piece GPS tracking bracelet.

The purchase of the Oracle-based VeriTracks business line from General Dynamics put into place the crime scene correlation program marketed separately to law enforcement agencies. The users can overlay the BluTag tracking system with their crime scene data to detect the proximity of the electronically monitored offenders near crime scenes.

The acquisitions paved the way for STOP to raise equity funding for its business plan from JHW Greentree Capital.

"We only wanted to go raise institutional funding when we could actually bring together both General Dynamics technology and the one-piece. It's only been until recently that this one-piece has come into production," Logan said.

Traditional electronic monitoring has integrated ankle bracelets with radio frequency to tether an offender to a specific location, such as his home. If the offender leaves the restricted area, an alarm alerts officials, who know only that the offender has left the area.

By contrast, GPS allows corrections officers to track the offender's movements in his restrictive zone 24/7 as dots on a computer map. Similar to the old system, a bracelet is affixed to the offender's ankle.

Until now, GPS systems haven't been able to interact with the ankle bracelet because the wearer needs a strong receiver to pick up GPS's faint signals. That has required the offender to carry around a separate lunchbox-type unit to house the battery and receiver. That two-piece system has proved ineffective and cumbersome, Logan said.

"The holy grail of the industry has been the one-piece. All of this in one piece," Logan said.

The smaller BluTag unit incorporates the GPS receiver into the ankle bracelet design, allowing the wearer freer movement. Logan admits the system isn't fool-proof.

"On any of these devices the straps can be cut off, but they're hard to get cut off. That's why this is not going to be appropriate for every inmate. There are some inmates that are going to have to stay locked up. But the biggest hammer on most parolees or probationers is the threat of going back to prison," he said.

The timing for STOP's products is on the mark, says Nashville corrections consultant Richard Cranes, a corrections consultant. Not only has the Bush Administration called for more alternatives to incarceration, but a recent Supreme Court decision gives federal judges more leeway in sentencing.

But Cranes said the company faces an industry that is often resistant to change, particularly as corrections budgets tighten.

"It's just finding the money that's going to be a difficult thing. But certainly this is a good time to be entering that market," Cranes said.

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