CALDWELL — Officer Bri Showerman uses a variety of media to communicate with the parolees she supervises. She has voicemails from them; she has emails and text messages as well. She has to stitch the correspondence together into an assessment of how her clients are doing and whether they’re complying with the terms of their supervision. It’s difficult.
But for 10 of her clients, the information is all in one place — an app on her phone and theirs. It’s called a.check, and it’s designed to help officers communicate with those on supervision. Parole officers in Idaho officially started using the app in May. Idaho is the first state to use a.check, designed by the electronic monitoring company Attenti.
A.check allows parolees to do everything from check in with facial recognition technology, to sift through documents relevant to their case. The app lets officers message their clients, video chat with them and allows them to ask a parolee or probationer to “check in” to see how they’re doing.
The department contracts with Attenti, and Idaho pays $1 per day for each person using a.check. Almost 30 staff members and nearly 160 people on supervision are using the app, according to Jeff Ray, spokesman for the Idaho Department of Correction. That would amount to an annual cost of almost $70,000.
“With this, I just go into the one app and I have access to all of it,” said Showerman, who works for the Idaho Department of Correction's Division of Probation and Parole. "To the text messages, the picture messages, (I have access) to all of their check-ins, to their employment verification — it’s all in one area.”
Idaho Department of Correction Director Josh Tewalt touted the app when he spoke to the Idaho Legislature’s Justice Reinvestment Oversight Committee on Oct. 29.
“It’s a really cool function that allows us to determine location and (a parolee’s) biometrics so we can confirm identity and allow people to check in with our (parole officers) where we know where they are.”
Apps like a.check are the latest trend in the world of probation and parole. Yet not all apps are created equal, and there are multiple options for a state or local government to choose from. The technology magazine Gizmodo, for instance, recently reported on the problems with Guardian, an app made by the prison communication company Telmate. According to the security experts Gizmodo spoke with, Guardian was “sloppy” and “irresponsible.” One Georgia parolee said parole officials forced her to buy a smartphone and download the app. It then would wake her up every half hour with a high-pitched alarm and send an alert to her parole officer that she wasn’t actually at home.
A.check doesn’t use alarms, said Dennis Cochems, a section supervisor for District 3 of the Idaho Department of Correction’s Division of Probation and Parole. While it does allow officers to determine where a person is, use of the app isn’t meant to be punitive. Neither Cochems nor Showerman said they’d heard much pushback from parolees using the app. In fact, parole officers, such as Showerman, tend to use the app as a reward, something a little less stringent than an ankle monitor.
“Say you have somebody who’s doing really great,” Cochems said. “They’ve attended all their classes, they graduated. They’ve been paying all their financial obligations. … If we haven’t seen that individual for a while and we just want to check in to see how they’re doing, we can do that.”
When asked how often use of the app has been successful, Showerman responded it was “hit or miss.”
The app requires the person on supervision to take a certain amount of initiative, she explained. It’s not for everyone. If a person doesn’t comply with the terms of their supervision anyway, she said, they probably won’t use the app in the way they’re supposed to either.
Her clients who do use it appreciate having everything in one place though.
“They like it just because of the convenience of it,” she said. “I haven’t had too many complaints.”
With the added concerns of the coronavirus pandemic, Cochems sees even more potential for the app. Many of the clients his parole officers work with have kids who must attend school online, he said. Coming into the office in person would be difficult for those clients.
“It kind of gives them a little bit more freedom as well,” Cochems said.
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