Oct 8, 2008 7:44 pm US/Eastern
Fla. Improves Technology To Track Sex Offenders
MIAMI GARDENS (AP) ―
Florida Department of Corrections officials demonstrated Wednesday an improved system for tracking sex offenders out on probation.
Until recently, when Florida probation officers went out to check on sex offenders wearing ankle bracelets, they had to leave an important tool in the office: the monitoring software that tracks the offenders.
If the probationer wasn't at home, the officer would call the offender, relatives and the offender's employer. If that didn't work, the officer might have to go back to the office to locate them using the GPS monitoring system. With up to 50 cases to check on, officers lost valuable time.
Now, the more than 350 Florida probation officers who monitor sex offenders carry laptops on the road that allow them to track offenders in real time. Officers can also update case files without having to return to the office.
Department of Corrections officials demonstrated the system Wednesday at a South Florida probation office and said it has allowed officers to be more efficient. That's important to a department that lost 200 probation officers due to budget cuts during the Legislative session.
The new system is called the Mobile Data Access System.
"MDAS allows us, allows our officer, to work smarter," said Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Walter McNeil.
"If they get to the home and the sex offender is gone, they get back in their car, get on the computer...and they look up in a real-time environment where this person is, where they've gone."
Florida currently has 194,000 people on probation statewide. That's about twice the population in the state's prisons. Of the people on probation, approximately 2,000 are being tracked by GPS devices, most of them convicted sex offenders.
Probation officer Doug Hampton said the new system has been helpful. He is the probation officer for one sex offender who is homeless. Having MDAS makes it easy for him to find the offender and check on him even though he doesn't have a home address, Hampton said.
Probation officers began field testing the system last year after it was developed by the Department of Corrections. The laptops and wireless technology that allows the computers to connect to the Internet were purchased with a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. The wireless bill is paid through 2009, but corrections officials hope to get the Legislature to fund the program and expand it to the some 2,500 probation officers statewide.
At least one other state agency is adopting technology designed to help workers be more efficient in the field.
In February, Department of Children & Families announced caseworkers would start carrying handheld devices like the ones delivery companies use to track packages to quickly update their case notes.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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