| Special Report Financial Mail |
| |
| Tracking Device
|
| The remote remedy
|
| |
|
How do you keep track of 4 500 prisoners who are either behind bars for a long period of time or on their way to court or another prison?
|
| |
| This was a problem the SA department of correctional services had to solve when it came to monitoring prisoners. |
| |
| It is not uncommon for a prisoner on a minor charge to change places with another facing a more serious charge. When they go to court, the serious offender gets off lightly while the other feigns ignorance when he faces the judge. |
| |
| To put an end to this ploy, the department is testing Exponªnt's Personal Tracking Device remote tracing system, which is a lightweight, nonallergenic rubber wristband device. |
| |
| Exponªnt formed a consortium with empowerment group Pytron to test the concept in a R28m pilot project. Each device has a 10-year guarantee and a five-year battery life as well as its own unique number. It leaves an "audit trail" of all of an inmate's movements. |
| |
| Interconnected mobile hand-held computers or personal digital assistants enable wardens to identify prisoners, send messages and raise alarms. |
| |
| Even if inmates do manage to swap wristbands, they can still be identified through fingerprint and photo images which are stored within the inmate tracking database. |
| |
| The process of going through a bail application has been shortened and security has been improved. |
| |
| Besides giving prison authorities more control, it also brings some advantages to prisoners, as it allows them to be presented to visitors immediately, since the process for identifying and tracking them, and then taking them to their visitors, is a lot quicker. |
| |
| The system also protects prisoners, as it is able to track which inmates are close to a prisoner who has been assaulted. |
| |
| The idea of remotely tracking prisoners may work well on paper. However, when it came to putting the concept into practice, there were challenges, says the consortium project manager, Eddie Gericke. Gericke says when the consortium began the project over a year ago, it found the radio frequency "unpredictable" and the sheer volume of detainees a challenge. |
| |
| The consortium therefore changed its strategy. Instead of sourcing equipment from abroad, it decided to develop products locally that were specifically designed to cope with the pressures of working in an SA environment. |
| |
| A pilot project was introduced at Johannesburg Medium A Prison. Before the inmate-tracking system was implemented there, between 25 and 30 detainees a day did not respond to calls to attend court appearances. This was done to delay procedures, which in turn could lead to cases being struck off the roll.
|
| |
|
As a result it took a number of officials about five days to find detainees who had a warrant for detention but could not be traced. |
| |
| With the assistance of the inmate tracking system, roll call is completed within a day. The system has the capability of tracking a detainee's whereabouts within the correctional centre at all times of the day and night, and to immediately identify that person's location. This makes it easy for officials to find detainees who do not respond when their names are called. |
| |
| "We have a world-class solution," Gericke says. Recently, one of Exponªnt's US competitors categorically stated at a workshop in the Netherlands that it had implemented an inmate tracking system in an institution holding the biggest number of detainees in the world, namely 1 875. But then the audience was astonished when informed by an SA correctional services representative that Exponªnt successfully tracks more than 4 500 detainees round-the-clock using locally developed technology. |
| |
| Exponªnt now wants to use its system to keep track of newborn babies in hospitals, as a safeguard against the risk of abduction. |
| |
|
 |
Eddie Gericke - Volume a challenge |
|
| |
