A Presentation

“Thanks for coming out this afternoon, it’s good to see so many of you. I see some familiar faces among the judges, I worked with many of you back when you were prosecutors, and there are some prosecutors here, some defense attorneys and, oh, some public defenders here as well as defense attorneys, that’s good. It’s nice to see you.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Tom Simmonds. I’ve been a police officer for the past twenty years and I’ve been asked to speak to you today about the county’s new alcoholic offender management system. I’m holding it here in my hand. As you can see it’s very lightweight and has a very non-intrusive, non-obtrusive design, as you can see. Would you mind passing that around? Thank you.

Basically, the way it works is like this - it works in a similar way to the breath operating machines that you’re familiar with except, instead of measuring breath, it measures sweat, ok? What we do is we put it on the offender’s ankle - and our people are trained and certified in how to put these things on. Let me make that clear. These people are certified monitors with this thing. And then, the offender basically keeps it on, round the clock. They shower with it on, they sleep with it on. It’s on all the time - constantly monitoring their alcohol intake and, if they drink anything, the unit sends us a report and we tell the State right away and that’s how a violation happens, just like that.

Now people always want to know how accurate the unit is. For example, if eating certain foods will set the unit off. Well, the unit accounts for all of that. I mean let’s be honest folks, if you eat enough food, you might get a reading, but you also might be in the hospital, right?

And we get all sorts of excuses for why things obstruct the monitor, because that’s what offenders do - they put a piece of paper in there or something and drink thinking that the paper will obstruct the testing. We even had a guy put a pork chop in there once. But there’s a sensor that measures how far the monitor is from the skin, and if that ever gets too far, the monitor reports that as a violation, so none of that’s going to work. But man, I tell you that we have heard it all.

Anyway, that’s basically the overview. And let me finish by telling you how glad we are that the county has adopted this program, and let me say thank you to the big Mr. State’s Attorney in the back for supporting this program and taking it on the campaign trail. We need to increase offender accountability, right? The goal is to help the offender get treatment so that they can become a meaningful part of society. These days, we’ve got a lot of tools that we didn’t have when I was starting out. I mean, I’m still trying to figure out how to program my TiVo, seriously. But, in terms of offender monitoring, we’ve got home detention devices, we’ve got GPS devices. We can know where these people are 24/7 and now we can make sure that they’re drinking what we think they should be drinking. So, it’s a very exciting time. Some very exciting things are happening.

Well, that’s it. Thanks for listening. Be sure to take a look at the unit, its making it’s way around. Thanks again.

Any questions?”