Wis. prison officials: GPS tracking for sex offenders failed in 49 states for 11 hours

By Todd Richmond, AP
Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Official: GPS sex offender tracking down across US

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin prison officials say a global positioning system that tracks sex offenders failed for several hours, leaving authorities in several states blind to offenders’ real-time movements.

Wisconsin Corrections Department spokeswoman Linda Eggert says her agency confirmed with the system’s manufacturer, Boulder, Colo.-based BI Incorporated, that the Tuesday outage affected 16,000 offenders.

Eggert says the outage began around 9 a.m. and was back up about 11 hours later.

She says Wisconsin prison officials had local police and probation agents detain about 140 offenders until the system was back up and their whereabouts during the outage could be confirmed.

A message left at BI’s offices wasn’t immediately returned.

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