New Ankle Bracelets For Drunk Drivers Faces Delay

The upcoming retirement of the resource coordinator for the Ogdensburg City Drug Treatment Court will mean that training for the use of ankle-worn monitoring bracelets for substance-abusing clients will be left to her successor.

Joan M. Kilroy, of Colton, will retire March 31 after five-and-a-half years of running the city program and its county counterpart, the St. Lawrence County Family Dependency Treatment Court. She would have been tapped to travel to Colorado for a two-day training session on the use of SCRAM - Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor - ankle monitoring bracelets.

Miss Kilroy said Friday that she was told recently by officials with the state Unified Court System's Fourth Judicial District - to which city court belongs - that "they're moving it (the SCRAMs) forward." But with her retirement and a successor possibly not likely to be on the job until sometime in April, the training and delivery of the SCRAMs to Ogdensburg could take a little longer. "The new resource coordinator will probably be the one," she said.

Last December, the Ogdensburg program received a $16,448 grant from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to purchase the ankle monitors. Miss Kilroy said the original application was for $35,000, an amount that would have covered the cost of 15 bracelets. Instead, with the funding that was approved, the city drug court will get between eight and 10 of them.

In the same round of grant funding, the combined Clinton and Essex counties drug court received $40,000. Miss Kilroy said that its resource coordinator and her successor will probably train in Colorado at the same time.

The SCRAM bracelet is able to register 24 hours a day the presence of alcohol in one's system through skin contact via an enzyme. The bracelet is so sensitive that its ability to detect alcohol can't be blocked, even by fabric. It works continuously seven days a week.

Drug court clients, who must wear the monitor for four months and stay sober, are in the program to stay clean in order to lessen or eliminate substance abuse-related convictions from their records. Those with multiple driving while intoxicated offenses. underage offenders and those with a high blood/alcohol content will wear the SCRAMs.