When ICE fitted a GPS ankle monitor on 20-year-old Pierre Damas Bel in Springfield, Ohio, this July, the device was one of roughly 53,000 GPS trackers strapped to immigrants under the agency’s Alternatives to Detention program — a 76% increase over the previous fiscal year, according to federal data reviewed by WCPO. Meanwhile in Prince […]
When DuPage County, Illinois signed a $678,000 electronic monitoring contract with Sentinel Offender Services in January 2026, the OmniLink OM500 was the hardware at the center of the deal. The same device sits on thousands of ankles across Georgia, Michigan, Florida, and Hawaii through NASPO ValuePoint cooperative procurement agreements. If you’re evaluating GPS ankle monitors […]
In the first week of September 2026, three unrelated cases across Alabama, Texas, and federal immigration courts exposed the same systemic vulnerability in house arrest ankle monitor programs: monitoring devices that fail exactly when courts need them most. In Jefferson County, Alabama, Circuit Judge Thomas Thrash Sr. revoked a murder suspect’s bond after her Sentinel […]
On August 31, 2026, Pierre Damas Bel — a 20-year-old Haitian honors student and varsity soccer player at Wright State University in Springfield, Ohio — walked onto Interstate 70 and stepped into the path of a tractor-trailer. He died at the scene. His family, his pastor, and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine all pointed to the […]
On August 26, 2026, the UK Ministry of Justice announced a policy that no other country has attempted at national scale: restriction zones — geographic boundaries that confine serious sexual and violent offenders to areas as small as a few miles wide after prison release, enforced by mandatory GPS ankle bracelet monitoring. The program launches […]
When Marshall Rayburn — a 34-year-old man accused of strangling his ex-girlfriend Peggy Beasley to death — was found to have been monitored by an electronic monitoring vendor that lost track of him for days before the murder, Louisiana legislators realized the state’s oversight of ankle monitor providers was essentially nonexistent. The result: Act 858, […]
When Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke stood before cameras in August 2026 and called the county’s electronic monitoring system “fundamentally broken,” she put a number on what corrections professionals across Illinois have known for years: 327 defendants on pretrial electronic monitoring had gone missing. Not temporarily non-reporting—missing. Their ankle monitors had been cut […]
When New York State Sen. Pam Helming stood beside Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman in Gates, N.Y. on August 17, 2026, the legislation they were pushing — the PROTECT Act (Pretrial Risk Overview for Threat Evaluation, Custody, and Treatment) — amounted to the most significant proposed overhaul of New York’s pretrial release framework since the […]
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement program tracking immigrants via GPS ankle monitors has tripled in 12 months — from 17,000 devices in early 2025 to nearly 54,000 in August 2026. This massive expansion, driven by an internal ICE memo directing staff to place ankle monitors on all Alternatives to Detention participants “whenever possible,” exposes […]
You’re evaluating GPS ankle monitor vendors. One offers a single device that does everything. Another offers a system: ankle tag plus portable tracking unit plus home base station. The two-piece vendor quotes 20% lower on hardware. Your procurement team leans toward the cheaper option. Twelve months later, your officers are spending 35% of their shift […]