ABSH... this is from the 10QSB of 30 March:
14M shares O/S
" The Company now designs, develops, produces, sells and supports
wireless products and services relating to the tracking, monitoring and
reporting of individuals and things. Currently, the Company's business
relates to criminal justice applications for house arrest and electronic
monitoring.
The ABS : ComTrak(R) product, which utilizes Global Positioning System
("GPS") technology, wireless communications and proprietary computer
software, provides real time monitoring, tracking and reporting of adult
and juvenile offenders as a criminal justice rehabilitative alternative.
Through controlled monitoring in ABS or customer staffed operations
centers, the system tracks the geographic location of every offender in the
system reports specific activities and identifies violations against
customer-established parameters. This information is then delivered to
the appropriate authorities using various methods, including telephone
calls, paging and internet-based e-mail and web-based reports. The Company
believes use of its system can offer substantial cost savings over the cost
of incarceration and improve the efficiency of probation and parole
officers. It also offers the backlogged criminal justice systems a more
secure solution to the problems of rapidly growing criminal populations,
overcrowded correctional facilities and more lenient sentencing
alternatives.
In addition to the criminal justice market, the Company has targeted
additional industries where it believes its products and services offer
attractive solutions to current problems. One market which the Company has
targeted is the transportation industry. This market would include (i)
automatic vehicle tracking and (2) through the installation of tracking
units at strategic locations, monitoring the status of freight cargo
(whether loaded or unloaded on the trailer or other container).
Another market which the Company has targeted is the healthcare
industry. This market would include (1) emergency response services and
(2) tracking infants and Alzheimer's patients.
(ii) The Electronic Monitoring Market
To date, the Company has focused primarily upon electronic monitoring
in the criminal justice system. The Department of Justice reported that
the 1998 prison population included 1,102,653 state prisoners and 107,381
federal prisoners for a total of 1,210,034. That was up 59,866 or 4.8%
from 1997. Counting the local 592,000 jail inmates, there were over 1.8
million people behind bars in the United States in 1998. In addition,
there were 704,000 individuals on parole and 3,400,000 persons on probation
for the same period. From the yearend 1985 to midyear 1998, the number of
inmates in the Nation's prisons and jails grew more than 1,058,000, an
annual increase of 7.3%, according to the Department of Justice Bureau of
Justice Statistics. The Department of Justice has projected an annual
growth equal to this historical rate.
This growth has resulted in stresses on the correctional system in
terms of both management and costs. While this has led to increased use of
probation and parole as alternatives to incarceration, caseworkers are
unable to monitor probationers and parolees effectively. Electronic
monitoring enhances the ability of caseworkers to monitor the activities of
probationers and parolees, as well as affording house arrest as an economic
alternative to incarceration.
3
According to the National Institute of Justice, electronic monitoring
offers two distinct advantages over incarceration, 1) it reduces the
public's tax burden by allowing the offender to work and, subsequently, to
pay for electronic monitoring costs, and 2) it reduces prison and jail
overcrowding by providing a viable alternative to incarceration.
The traditional house arrest application utilizes (1) a fixed location
radio frequency device connected to a power source and telephone line (a
"house arrest unit") and (2) a tamper-proof transmitter cuff worn by the
offender. The individual under house arrest must remain within a specified
distance of the house arrest unit. When they leave that proximity, the
house arrest unit transmits a notification over the telephone line to a
monitoring center. The monitoring center software and operators determine
if this is a permitted or authorized departure, using tables of individual
schedules provided by the contracting authorities. If they determine it is
a violation of the programmed schedule, a violation notice is created and
the appropriate authorities are contacted using pre-established protocols.
These protocols can include voice calls, paging, faxing, e-mail or some
combination. Additionally, reports are created for transmission as
required by the customer organization.
House arrest monitoring equipment first became commercially available
in 1984. In 1987, twenty-one (21) states reported using this electronic
monitoring as a sentencing alternative. By 1995, all fifty states were
using at least limited amounts of house arrest electronic monitoring.
Experts estimate that as many as 300,000 individuals now incarcerated could
be supervised more cost-effectively and safely using appropriate electronic
supervision. [Source: Journal of Offender Monitoring, January 1998 and
March 1999 issues] There were an estimated 95,000 individuals under
electronic house arrest at the beginning of 1998. These individuals were
monitored primarily through third party service providers under contract to
the appropriate local, state and federal agencies.
The Company believes there is a substantial opportunity to provide a
mobile system to monitor offenders in the community environment away from
the fixed house arrest location. ABS has pioneered the development of a
mobile personal tracking unit a "tracking unit") system which provides
continuous monitoring away from the fixed location, utilizing GPS
locational information and wireless communications technologies. As of
December 31, 1999, the Company had approximately 28 of its GPS-based
tracking units in use in the criminal justice system in Arizona, Indiana,
Minnesota, Texas, New York, Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin.
The term of the Company's typical contract ranges in duration from day
to day to annual. No maximum or minimum number of persons to be monitored
is typically specified. Rather, the Company charges a fixed fee based upon
the number of tracking units in service at any given time, which number can
frequently vary from day to day. Tracking units are sold or leased in
conjunction with the provision of monitoring services by the Company. The
Company also sells or leases tracking units to third party providers of
monitoring services."
Tom |
