Digitizing Customer-Facing Court Functions Maricopa County Jail, Arizona/Yamhill County Jail, Oregon
TouchPay Holdings’ comprehensive automated payment services for government agencies collects deposits, payments, and fees. Beginning back in 2004, the founders of the company realized that a large number of people who need to make deposits and payments were unbanked or off the internet and cashier windows and manual payment processing are inevitably inefficient. Their initial product was a Lobby Kiosk designed for correctional facilities. Today TouchPay kiosks have been expanded to courts and other government agencies, most often located in child support offices, DMVs and other high traffic government locations, courthouses and probation offices. “TouchPay has become the leading provider of automated payment solutions to child support agencies,” says Keith Benton, the director of Government Payments, “and also processes a lot of self-release payments, probation payments, and restitution and fees. Some municipalities and other government agencies use TouchPay kiosks to process parking tickets and fines and fees.” Self-Release/Self-Bail is a common payment option on TouchPay Lobby Kiosks and offering it is beneficial to the court, the facility, and inmates and their loved ones, according to the company. Rather than borrowing the bail amount from a bail bondsman and paying a fee of 10% or more for the service, with Self-Release the depositor only pays a low transaction fee for each deposit to the account and
TouchPay’s Lobby Kiosk offers comprehensive automated payment services for government agencies. It collects deposits, payments and fees, including child support and self-bail.
deposits accumulate to reach the amount set by the court. This enables several different people to contribute what they can toward bail. Self-Release accounts are most prevalent in County Sheriff’s Offices because they detain both offenders and suspects. More than 60 TouchPay clients offer Self-Bail. Examples include Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the five largest jails in the U.S. with an average daily population of more than 9,000, and Yamhill County Jail in Oregon, which houses less than 300 detainees. Both accept Self-Release payments using cash or credit and debit cards on the TouchPay Lobby Kiosks and with cards only on TouchPay’s countertop terminals, on the web, or with the toll-free phone system. Maricopa began providing the Self-Release option in 2015 but Yamhill was an early adopter in 2009. In Oregon, the state does not allow “commercial” bail bonding, so the detainee must gather the funds needed in order to be released before trial and, according to Yamhill County, making selfrelease deposits at the Lobby Kiosk has been good for all parties. “We are a rural community and housing an offender is costly for taxpayers. When we added the ability to take bail at the kiosk, deposits could be made at all hours, we decreased our administrative overhead, and lodging costs and liability were significantly reduced,” says Sheriff Tim Svenson of the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office. CT