Ankle bracelet program debuts

Published 9:36 pm Friday, August 25, 2006

Aaron Robert Williams walked out of the Whitfield County Jail on Wednesday 90 days earlier than he thought he would just three months ago.

Williams, sentenced to a year in jail in May on a theft by receiving stolen property charge, is the first person in Whitfield County to have an ankle bracelet placed on him. The ankle bracelet will be used to monitor his movements for the next 90 days as part of a pilot program initiated by the Whitfield County district attorney’s office.

Judge Robert Adams agreed to modify Williams’ sentence Tuesday to reflect the change from a jail term to the ankle bracelet.

The district attorney’s office received 10 ankle bracelets last week, allowing it to begin a 90-day pilot program with Georgia Probation Services, which will serve as the local monitor for the program.

The hope is that by placing ankle bracelets on inmates instead of making them serve jail time that the population of the jail will be reduced. The program, including the bracelet, costs $10 a day, as opposed to $36 a day to house an inmate, officials say. How much is spent on the program overall depends on how many inmates participate.

The challenge has been to find inmates who qualify for the bracelets.

There are no rigid rules right now, said chief assistant district attorney Bert Poston. The main requirement at this point is the inmate must be serving a local jail sentence. Out of 449 inmates in the jail on Wednesday, only two were deemed qualified for the program.

“We have a list of inmates and we’re going through them,” Poston said. “We’ve had a couple of people contact us. One was serving a state sentence and one was getting out of jail in two weeks anyway.”

Bentley Adams, chief public defender, said his office is talking with the district attorney’s office about who may be eligible.

“I think first-time drug offenders would be appropriate but we haven’t reached a consensus on that,” Adams said. “What we’ll be doing is suggesting that alternative.”

On Thursday, Louis Bryant, on probation from Dalton Municipal Court, also walked out of jail with an ankle bracelet.

“It is an alternative approach to supervision rather than just … penalizing them with complete revocation (of their probation),” said Judge Jerry Moncus, who presides over Dalton city court.

“It gives them a chance to show us they are sincere about completing their probation and the requirements of their probation.”

Secure Alert, a national company that is supplying the bracelets, will monitor the person wearing the bracelet from its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. If the person tries to take off the bracelet or goes somewhere he or she is not supposed to, an alarm will sound at the monitoring facility, said District Attorney Kermit McManus.

Secure Alert can speak to the inmate wearing the bracelet through the monitoring system in the device.

Secure Alert will contact Georgia Probation Services employees, who can also talk to the person wearing the bracelet, if the person doesn’t comply with the conditions of the bracelet, McManus said.

“If he is not complying, we’re going to send the police,” McManus said.

Whitfield County is one of the first jurisdictions in the nation with the new technology, McManus said.

Maj. John Gibson with the sheriff’s office said he hopes the program is successful.

“Anything that can help reduce the jail population, I’m all for it,” Gibson said. “We’ll have to wait and see how the program works out.”