JAY – In the future, when an incarcerated person is released into the community to serve the rest of a jail sentence, local police will be notified.

Jay Police Chief Larry White Sr. said he was not notified that Craig Tracy was under house arrest on a monitoring system on Maxwell Road before Tracy was accused of raping a teenage girl.

Tracy had one month left to serve of a six-month sentence for burglary of a motor vehicle when he was OK’d for the monitoring program wearing an ankle bracelet. When the alleged gross sexual assault occurred he was down to 22 days left, Franklin County Sheriff Dennis Pike said.

Tracy was where he was supposed to be but he had company, Pike said. Tracy rented a separate apartment at the back of a house where his aunt and her children live.

Pike said he will make sure police departments are notified from now on when someone is on the program in their community. Pike said he does have a deputy check on a person on the program every few days to make sure they’re where they are supposed to be and adhering to conditions.

One of those conditions allowed Tracy to drink alcohol but not excessively, Assistant District Attorney Andrew Robinson said. The conditions are drawn up administratively by the jail.

The county jail has a contract with Community Corrections Alternatives Inc. to electronically monitor people eligible for the program out in the community.

To qualify for the program the person must be considered a minimum classification at the jail and meet certain standards, including having good behavior at jail, said Goyo Stinchfield, director of jail services for Community Corrections Alternatives.

The client pays for the service, including between $10 to $20 a day depending on their income eligibility, Stinchfield said.

Stinchfield said the program has to accept the individual and a place of residence needs to be established for the client as well as the case presented to the District Attorney’s Office, the jail administration and sheriff, to see if they all agree with the proposal. If any one of those people doesn’t agree, it doesn’t happen, Pike said.

The electronic monitoring system program has a one out of seven success rate, Stinchfield said.

The system works through the phone lines. A box is plugged in at the residence where the person is staying and that person wears either a bracelet around their wrist or ankle, Stinchfield said. If a person steps outside their restricted area, the box will alert the company and they will alert Stinchfield’s pager of that violation.

A person is allowed time to go to work and other agreed upon places such as a doctor’s appointment and food shopping.

Pike said the program has saved the county thousands of dollars that otherwise would have had to be picked up by the taxpayers.