Monitoring Criminals With GPS

A 2-year old pilot program that uses Global Positioning Systems to monitor sex offenders is expanding.

The Board of Probation and Parole currently monitors 330 high risk sex offenders in 8 cities, including Nashville, with a GPS ankle bracelet. Their actions are recorded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If they wander into what’s called an “exclusion zone” which is somewhere they’re forbidden to go, an alert is sent out to a local officer who then investigates it.

By the end of the year, the program will be rolled out statewide. Kirk Smith oversees unit that supervises violent and sexual offenders. She says GPS can catch something that could otherwise be easily missed.

“We had one officer that was mapping and saw that an offender had started going to a particular location on a repeated basis. When she went to that residence, she determined that he had established a relationship with a woman who had small children which was a direct violation of his supervision standards. And, see, without GPS, that would’ve never have been known.”

Smith says some high risk violent offenders will also be monitored by GPS. The program is part of the Jessica Lunsford Act, named for the 9-year old Florida girl who was killed by an unregistered sex offender.

Probation: judges put people on probation

*break probation, go to jail*

Parole: parole paroles

*must be in prison before you’re on parole*

It’s a combination of factors that would determine whether or not they are monitored by GPS.