By Kim Nguyen
The Gazette
COLORADO SPRINGS — County jails in Colorado, including the Criminal Justice Center in El Paso County, will soon receive help in notifying about 200,000 crime victims of the whereabouts of their perpetrators.
The County Sheriffs of Colorado said in January that sheriff’s offices will use a new, Web-based system to monitor inmates’ custody status. The Victim Information and Notification Everyday system will check jail data in all 64 counties every 15 minutes.
When VINE finds a change, it will within minutes notify the victim by phone or e-mail, said Don Christensen, executive director of the County Sheriffs of Colorado.
“It’s got to do that. If the (inmate) has ill intentions, by the time he gets out to the time it takes for him to see the victim may be a matter of minutes,” he said.
The jails, which can house up to about 11,800 inmates, are expected to be using VINE by August 2009.
El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said he hopes to have it running in his jail by March.
The Criminal Justice Center, in Colorado Springs, is one of the largest jails in the state, with 1,599 beds.
Michael Westbay applauds efforts to keep victims informed. Westbay, the uncle of one of two boys shot to death in the infamous Valentine’s Day slaying in 1997, said he found out from the media, not authorities, that one of the killers had been freed from prison.
But even if he had been notified, Westbay said, it would not have addressed all his concerns.
“There’s really no security. ... We knew it was all just a matter of time that these guys would be released,” he said.
“There’s no comfort. ... We can’t bring these boys back.”
County Sheriffs of Colorado is in charge of implementing VINE, using a $430,000 grant from the Bureau of Justice Administration.
Under state law, crime victims have the right to be informed of the court, jail and prison status of an offender. Law enforcement agencies are mandated to provide that information to them.
“Over the years, we’ve dealt with the victims, and we see the trauma they go through,” Christensen said. “So anything we can do to give them a sense of security and comfort, that’s our motivation.”
Maketa added, “I don’t think there is a worse situation than a victim of a sexual assault runs into the suspect at a mall when they believe that suspect is incarcerated. That’s a terrible situation. We owe it to the victims to let them know where their perpetrators are.”
The shift to VINE affects only county jails.
The Colorado Department of Corrections is responsible for informing victims of the status of state prisoners.
And district attorneys’ offices are required to inform victims of a defendant’s status in the court system.
Christensen said VINE was started after the death of a woman in Louisville, Ky., in 1993.
Mary Byron was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend as she was leaving work.
Byron didn’t know her exboyfriend had been released from jail weeks before the shooting.
He had been charged with kidnapping and raping Byron at gunpoint.
“The people in Kentucky saw the need for this system. Once they developed it, it started to sell,” Christensen said. VINE is now used in 42 states.
VINE will replace the different systems being used by county jails.
Maketa said VINE will free up time for deputies in El Paso County, who are responsible for calling victims.
It can tie up deputies, he said, especially if they have to make multiple calls to reach the victim.
The Sheriff’s Office had been using an electronic system, called VOICE, since 1999. But Maketa said VOICE was antiquated and was not compatible with the sheriff’s jail database and other telephone technologies, like call waiting and voice mail.
The office went to manual notification in late 2004 or early 2005, he said.
“That system was plagued with problems since inception. As blocked numbers, call waiting and things like that became more common in households, we began to encounter a lot of problems,” Maketa said.
Not only will VINE address those problems, Maketa said, but it will make it more convenient for victims to receive the notifications.
Victims will be able to log on to VINE at www.vinelink. com and have calls routed to different phone numbers or addresses if they go out of town or need to have calls rerouted temporarily.
Christensen said VINE is also multilingual, with the capability of sending messages in at least 20 languages.
The Web site will also have a search engine available to the public to look up inmates.
Copyright 2008 The Gazette