NaviGadget

Inmates in Nevada get a free GPS bracelet worth $375

Jun 14, 2006 gps navigation, misc news

An $805,500 experiment that will have inmates at a southern Nevada prison wearing global positioning devices was approved Tuesday by a legislative panel, following some arguments against the spending.

During an Interim Finance Committee session, Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, and Assembly Ways and Means Chairman Morse Arberry, D-Las Vegas, questioned the GPS bracelets that young convicts will wear at the prison at Jean.

Titus said she was having a hard time seeing why the money should be used for electronically monitoring inmates inside prisons since lawmakers had been told authorities lacked funding to closely monitor sex offenders who have been released from prison.

Arberry added, “We need to monitor the ones on the street because they’re gang-banging all day long.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, said he too had concerns about the project, but added the 2005 Legislature approved the funding.

“I don’t know that we can second-guess it,” Raggio said, adding, “We put it into the law. We have to do it.”

Glen Whorton, director of the state prison system, said the GPS bracelets will help in managing 18-to-25-year-old convicts who tend to be more difficult to handle than older inmates.

Whorton and other prison system officials said the GPS devices were funded after legislators declined to authorize all the guards that were requested during the 2005 session. If the full request had been approved, it would have added more than $1 million to prison costs.

The devices will track inmate locations, and set off an alarm if a convict enters an off-limits area or tries to escape or remove a bracelet. If there’s a prison brawl, the devices will show what inmates were in the area where the fight occurred. If an inmate claims to have been assaulted by a guard, there will be a record of whether the inmate was at the correctional officer’s post.

The state is contracting with Elmo-Tech Inc., of Elmhurst, Ill., for the monitoring system. Each transmitter will cost $375.

The Southern Nevada Correctional Center at Jean, 25 miles south of Las Vegas, has been closed while being redesigned as a 600-bed facility for male convicts 25 or younger. The monitoring system will be ready by the time the prison reopens in mid-September.