PE.COM : TRACKING DEVICE FIRM STAYING ON COURSE

PE.com — When former San Bernardino County Supervisor Paul Biane as well as co-defendants Mark Kirk, Jeff Burum and Jim Erwin were ordered to sport a high-tech ankle accessory to keep track of their whereabouts, the San Bernardino County Superior Court sent them to Leaders in Community Alternatives Inc. in Riverside. It was either that, or their bail may have remained as high as $10 million for developer Burum and $2 million each for the rest.

The four, charged with multiple felonies for their suspected involvement in a purported bribery scheme that led to a developer receiving a $102 million settlement from San Bernardino County, are among just 27 people in the region wearing LCA's GPS-enabled ankle bracelets that, in their case, keep the defendants from leaving Southern California's boundaries.

The industry has been slow to grow, said Linda Connelly, CEO of LCA, who has been in the electronic monitoring industry for 37 years.

But she expects that to change considering the rising costs and lack of space to imprison criminals and the accused as well as technological advancements that have made it easier to monitor the whereabouts and activities of those wearing a tracking device on their ankle.

"It's good to see the pendulum swinging back again," she said.

It costs about $122.10 per inmate, per day to house someone in Riverside County's jails.

LCA's bracelets don't cost the county anything. All costs are born by the wearer and, in most cases, LCA has a sliding scale it charges based on a person's household income. That was the case in San Bernardino County. Burum, Biane, Erwin and Kirk were all ordered to pay for their own devices.

Aaron Marsolino paid $10 a day for 365 days to wear one of LCA's radio-frequency ankle bracelets when he was put under house arrest. It was better than the 15-year prison sentence the 28-year-old Wildomar musician faced after he punched a wall and took a baseball bat to a girlfriend's door after a heated argument. He pled guilty to four charges, among them three felonies, and agreed to take a weekly anger-management class. Marsolino was a rare "client," though. Only 5 to 10 percent of LCA's bracelet wearers have been charged with felonies.

Marsolino said he never tested the bracelet's limits and didn't know what would have happened if he had. "I didn't want to know," he said. The thought of going to prison was too terrifying to risk messing up even in the slightest, he said.

His ankle bracelet came off in March.

"I feel I've really come out a better person," he said. "It's taught me to mellow. ... I don't think there would have been any rehabilitation if I would have been put in prison."

Connelly's company came to the Inland region in 1994, first to Banning, to help the Riverside County Sheriff's Department set up its own electronic tracking system, building it up from a program that tracked about 50 people to one that now tracks about 400.

Seven of the San Francisco company's 45 employees are based in Riverside overseeing the cases of about 185 people in the two-county region who don a court-ordered monitoring device.

Overhead to manage the caseload is high and there are equipment costs. The devices Connelly buys and rents out to those ordered to wear them by the court cost her company $600 for a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet to $1,500 for an alcohol- and drug-monitoring device. A radio-frequency bracelet that taps into a wearer's phone line costs her company $1,200.

The company has a small office in Riverside and a satellite office inside the county's probation department in Indio that staff members visit twice a week. Another small office will soon open in Perris. Like any other traditional business, Connelly says it's an effort to be closer to her customers.

Reach Kimberly Pierceall at 951-368-9552 or kpierceall@PE.com