By C1 Staff
ROCKFORD — Inmates in the Winnebago County Jail are now eligible to receive a cash reward up to $1,000 for providing information that leads to an arrest.
“The sheriff is pulling out all the resources,” Winnebago County Jail Supernintendant Bob Redmond told rrstar. “Obviously, people here hear things. If they can tell us this is where [a suspect] lives. This is what he does. They can get paid for it.”
It’s possible for a jailhouse informant to use the money to bond themselves out of jail.
All calls made to Crime Stoppers are anonymous, which means that there’s no way to track where the calls are coming from.
Jail inmates can call the tip line from a special number, and have a code number to be able to tell if they’ve received a cash reward for their information.
Winnebago County isn’t the first to expand Crime Stoppers to jail inmates; central Indiana has had the line available to inmates since 2009.
The director of Crime Stoppers in Indiana said the tips increased when inmates were allowed to call the line. The first year the tips expanded from 2,500 to 5,500; the number of tips this year is on pace to top 6,000.