BATON ROUGE – Law enforcement and lawmakers are fed up with the lack of oversight over privately owned ankle monitoring companies.
Currently, there are no standards under Louisiana law governing electronic monitoring providers.
The Department of Public Safety and Corrections does not monitor these devices. That is done by the private companies that provide them.
House Bill 556 will attempt to change that.
“The system is only as good as the person monitoring the data and that’s what this bill does. It actually makes them monitor and they have to report immediately as opposed to sending a letter and police and law enforcement not knowing what’s going on until then and then it’s too late”
It will put more control in the hands of DPSC by providing data directly to them such as a persons location and give real time alerts for any device tampering or low batteries.
It will also alert when an offender leaves the specific zone they are allowed to be in.
Lawmakers also want to develop a statewide system for use of GPS monitoring and create a centralized registry on people being monitored and their violations.
The bill heads to the House floor for debate and eventually a vote.
Leave a Reply