Chief Probation Officer answers Gazette questions re: AB109

On October 1, 2012 the state of California had been operating under the prison realignment bill AB 109 for one year.  Within weeks of the AB 109 anniversary Calaveras County Probation Department announced that they would be contracting out the Adult Day Reporting Center operations to BI Inc, a company specializing in electronic monitoring and probation style reporting centers. The Gazette took the opportunity to ask Chief Probation Officer Teri Hall a few questions.
 
When will the contract with BI Inc be signed? Unsure, the CCP is discussing the construction budget.

According to BI electronic monitoring will not be within their duties for Calaveras County, how do you plan on handling the issue of lack of cell service in the county with regards to electronic monitoring? As you know, cell service is a challenge for everyone who lives in the Foothill region.  We work with the offenders that live in remote areas, to have them respond daily to a location that will allow the GPS points to load onto the satellite.

An adult Day Reporting Center was implemented in Tuolumne in January, was there sound reasoning why Calaveras did not implement a program of this nature within the first year of AB109 funding?  Our Plan was not passed until April 2012, we simply did not have time to put a DRC in place before the end of the fiscal year June 2012.   

What recidivism statistics do you have for the 11/12 AB109 funding year? I can only speak to the 30 offenders on Post-Release Community Supervision and released on 1170’s on a split sentence (those that would have been sent to state prison if not for AB109).

Since October 2011 of the 30 offenders being supervised by the Probation Department, 13 have been arrested or cited.  Please keep in mind that some of those arrests were the same person arrested multiple times and some were for warrants (not new law violations).  The new law violations mostly involved drugs, there were no property crimes recorded by this population.

In addition we also have a Courage to Change Program that is extremely successful, we have had the program in place for three years and of the 20 graduates only two have committed new law violations.  Those two are be recycled through the program.  We also have 9 Post-Release Community Supervision offenders slated to graduate in the upcoming months.

What programs have been implemented with the funding for the last year? The two programs that have been specifically named in the plan are the Day Reporting Center and  Re-entry Services, neither program has been fully implemented at this time.

Were other county juvenile facilities contacted for possible contract services for juvenile detention?  Sacramento County has a wide array of services that met our needs for the specific juvenile we were handling at the time, therefore no other halls were considered.