Home detention is now high tech in Spartanburg County

Accessing the software that keeps track of some of the home detention program's sophisticated equipment, program coordinator Nancy Vinson is responsible for keeping tabs on the nearly 150 inmates currently in the program in Spartanburg County.

For some people, thinking about home detention, compared to spending time locked inside a secure facility, may seem little more than the judge saying, "You're grounded. Stay in your room for a month."

The truth is rather a bit more sophisticated and involved than that, explains home detention coordinator Nancy Vinson, who oversees the program for the Spartanburg County Detention Facility.

"This tool can be used in a variety of ways," Vinson says of the program she supervises. "One of the things the electronic equipment does is take the emotional value" out of being locked behind bars, particularly with other prisoners. This tends to cut down on the types of problems that invariably arise from restraining people behind locked doors at a county-maintained facility.

If most people were asked to think about it, they would envision the tools of home detention as little more than some kind of electronic bracelet that would sound an alarm when a prisoner goes where they shouldn't be. As far as that goes, the image is reasonably accurate.

But as Vinson explains, the range and sophistication of the different devices used to monitor the nearly 150 inmates currently in the home detention program, are a bit more high-tech than the human equivalent of a dog's "invisible fence" collar.

There are different elements involved in Spartanburg County's tools for tracking home-bound prisoners ranging from ankle bracelet transmitters and home monitoring units to devices capable of providing real-time GPS coordinates, body temperature and blood-alcohol levels, Vinson says. Most people sentenced to home detention are facing DUI charges or child support violations from Family Court where maintaining an ability to earn income is important. Besides an assistant, Vinson is aided by two deputies in overseeing the incarceration of home detention prisoners.

Vinson says that most prisoners in the program are assigned to it as a condition of their bail. In addition, everyone who takes part in the program must complete about 30 pages of documentation and acknowledge that tampering with or removing the monitoring device will be charged the same as escape. That charge can add as much as five years to the sentence.

"It makes people less likely to run from us," Vinson says dryly.

Even with the additional charges, the program manages about a 70 percent success rate of prisoners who follow the proscriptions against their freedom of movement. For the people who abide by the terms of the program, they avoid being locked in one of the detention facility's pods and the county saves the money that incarceration would cost.

Vinson explains that it runs between $6 to $13 per day to monitor the equipment, a service provided by Sentinel Offender Services and Alcohol Monitoring Systems (SCRAM). Utilizing the GPS and blood-alcohol monitoring aspects of the service, the equipment entails costs toward the upper end of that range.

Vinson explains that many of the GPS units are assigned to prisoners who are involved in drug-related charges, and that the system can monitor whether the prisoner goes into a known drug area. Such a move would, of course, lead to a system alert.

Vinson explains that people registered in home detention are listed on the Detention Facility's Web site, www.spartanburgcountyjail.org, including the nine currently wanted for escaping from home detention. Scrolling between the Web site and the software she uses to monitor inmates, she explains that overseeing the program is invariably interesting.

"I never now what my day's going to be like," Vinson says. "I get to be like some Santa Claus who says who's been naughty or nice."

(This is the fourth and final article in a series in which Hometown News profiled the personnel and responsibilities of the Spartanburg County Detention Facility)