Singapore has one of the lowest rates at which prisoners re-offend, which is largely attributable to the success of its Home Detention Scheme (HDS).
In a bid to re-integrate inmates into society, Singapore prisons introduced HDS in May 2000, allowing eligible prisoners to spend the tail-end of their sentences in their own homes with the provision of a monitoring system to track their movements.
The HDS is only considered for offenders of non-serious crimes and on one condition - the prisoner must either be working or studying while on the scheme. The system allows perpetrators of low security risk crimes the opportunity to rehabilitate and reintegrate into society, rather than spend time in prison with hardened, violent criminals.
Key to the success of this programme is the technology used to track the offenders and in a recent bid process, Cartrack, a vehicle tracking and recovery, fleet management and telematics service provider was awarded the contract to supply the monitoring technology.
The HDS entails the monitoring of persons-of-interest, remotely, through a central monitoring system (CMS). The CMS deployed for the project has been developed by Cartrack, utilising the control room platform that is utilised in its fleet management system.
According to Cartrack, the system effectively communicates and relays information from field-monitoring devices that detect the presence of the person in their residence in the event of a house arrest or any other specified location, in addition to tracking their movements.
"The Singapore HDS serves as a platform to showcase our newly developed system that seamlessly supports the operations of multiple agencies efficiently, effectively and in real-time," says Evert Ong of Cartrack Singapore.
"We have integrated our technical ability and operational know-how to deliver an enhanced system for electronic tagging, monitoring and management of 800 to 2 000 persons-of-interest per month."
The system was designed to function as a stand-alone entity within a private network for security reasons. The monitoring and maintenance of the system is done in Singapore by the local Cartrack branch with the expertise and technical transfer of knowledge from Cartrack's headquarters in SA.
"As an outsourced managed services solution to the consortium, we are responsible for the daily operations and to make any exceptional event reporting available to the individual agencies involved," explains Ong.
"The system is similar to that of tracking vehicles. However, certain parameters had to be tweaked as the tracking of an individual requires some level of innovation and imagination to counter attempts by offenders to bypass the system."
John Edmeston, MD of Cartrack SA adds: "The prisoner tracking units provide a graphical user interface on a map and record the historical movements of the individual with timestamps. The information can be kept for a specified period of time for record keeping purposes, which is a year in this specific case.
"All the GPS tracking units also offer geo-fencing that sets a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographical area that is perfectly suited for this specific application of our technology. The units additionally offer the flexibility of being configured and upgraded remotely."
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