Southern States Select Omnilink to Monitor Offenders

ATLANTA — Omnilink Systems is providing electronic monitoring devices for probation departments in the South, assisting the departments in setting boundaries for offenders in their communities.

Georgia House Arrest Services Inc., an alternative sentencing provider, is one of the first companies to utilize Omnilink’s Focalpoint 2.0 offender-monitoring system. The company typically uses the system in pretrial scenarios when a defendant is considered a flight risk or a repeat offender.

The Juvenile Probation Board of Hale County, Texas, selected Focalpoint 2.0 to replace its land-based monitoring system, which only notified probation officers when offenders were at home. The county will use the new system to monitor youth that are on probation as an alternative to incarceration in hopes of reducing monitoring costs and recidivism rates.

The system provides real-time updates on the location of parolees and is capable of tracking people and valuable assets inside buildings, buses, trains and other places where GPS systems typically do not work.

The system is a combination of GPS, wireless network technologies and RFID. Situation-specific sensors transmit information to a monitoring center using commercial cellular networks and apply predefined supervision rules on a Web-based program. The Web program also works to locate monitored individuals who are suspected of being involved in subsequent crimes.

The system features automated voice alerts when a location violation has occurred. In addition, a victim safeguard tracks the victim’s cell phone and alerts the individual if the offender is near.