Private Prison Execs Launch GPS Firm

NASHVILLE – An electronic monitoring start-up company, headed by former private-prison executives, recently secured new funding and acquired two other companies.

Satellite Tracking of People LLC (STOP) acquired the VeriTracks business line from General Dynamics and Verquis from Strategic Technologies Inc. STOP’s chairman is Doctor R. Crants, a co-founder of Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), the first private prison company in the United States.

Steven Logan, a founding executive at Cornell Companies Inc., will act as STOP's CEO. STOP President Joseph F. Johnson is a former CCA board member and founder of the National Corrections & Rehabilitation Corp., a community corrections management firm, and was executive director of Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition.

“The acquisitions bring together first-of-its-kind in the field of Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking for offenders within the criminal justice system, including patented crime scene correlation capabilities and the only one-piece GPS bracelet available in the market today,” according to a company statement.

VeriTracks is an Oracle-based system that links GPS data to the location and time of reported crime incidents. In addition, STOP holds the exclusive U.S. rights to the one-piece tracking device, BluTag, which was developed by General Dynamics.