What is a SCRAM Device?

Hello everyone. This is Deandra Grant, and welcome to the Ask Deandra video series, where I try to answer the most commonly searched questions about Texas DWI law. This video series corresponds with my Ask Deandra blog series that’s on my website, so you should be able to scroll down to the description of this video, and the corresponding blog URL will be down there. If you want to read more about this topic, you can go look at the blog.

Today’s question is: what is a SCRAM device?

We don’t have tons and tons of clients that are on SCRAM devices. You will usually find SCRAM ordered on people who are facing felony DWI charges sometimes, or people that have been involved in fatality accidents will sometimes be ordered. It also varies by county. Some judges really like SCRAM and like to put it on people. Also, if people have repeated bond violations, you’re ordered not to drink alcohol and you keep triggering positive alcohol readings on your interlock device, then a judge may order SCRAM.

So what is it? It is basically a device that sits up against your skin on your ankle. It’s like a little ankle bracelet, and what it does is it reads perspiration, and ethanol if present, that comes off your skin. It does a transdermal alcohol reading. It reads about every 30 minutes. It’s very annoying.

I wore one for a weekend for an experiment at a seminar years ago in California, when I was presenting to the California public defenders. I was trying to talk about SCRAM with some knowledge base, so I wore one and I drank, and they tracked my drinking, tracked my readings on the device. It was all very interesting.

But the device kind of vibrates a little bit when it’s taking a reading. So imagine when you’re going to bed, you’re laying there and you’re trying to fall asleep, and every 30 minutes you get this little buzzing on your ankle. It’s not real significant, but it’s annoying. Sometimes it can be hard to fall asleep. It’s also up against your skin, and for some people it will rub a blister or bruise on your skin. So it can have a lot of negative things about it. I have had clients that got huge blisters, and we kept having to have the ankle bracelet moved to the other ankle till the right side healed, and then move it back to the right side.

I also don’t know this for certain, but I feel, just in dealing with some of my clients anecdotally, that some people might be a little bit allergic to whatever the metal is that’s on that device, because I think that’s why some people have a reaction to it on their skin and others don’t. I don’t have any data on that. I’ve just seen it enough to think it really hurts some people, and some people it doesn’t. For me, I wore it for 3 days and it left a big bruise on my ankle. That was just 3 days, and then what if you were ordered to have it for a year? So, not fun. Not a fan of the device.

But what does it do? In theory, what it’s doing is it is reading if you were to drink alcohol. Let’s say you drank two beers, but you’ve been ordered not to drink alcohol, and you did it anyway. At some point, alcohol absorption and elimination is going on in your body. I will say that the transdermal reading lags behind blood alcohol by about 2 hours, and it also never gets as high as the blood alcohol reading, but that’s a story for another day, and I don’t want to get too far into the scientific weeds on this. Basically, a tiny little bit of alcohol, once it’s being eliminated from your body, comes out through your skin, and this device is designed to read that. So if you were drinking alcohol, it would catch it on this device.

Then it’s relayed, just like if you’ve used an ignition interlock device, that data is relayed to whoever is supervising you. It could be probation or could be bond supervision, whoever it is, and then that information is relayed on to the judge. So if you’re out on bond and you get readings on your SCRAM device, you are going to find yourself back in the courtroom explaining yourself to the judge.

That sounds great, right? From a societal standpoint, if you’re ordered not to drink and you’re drinking, then the judge finds out about it because you’re wearing this device. That all sounds great. The problem with SCRAM is that other things can cause that device to read an ethanol level and report out a transdermal ethanol level that is not actually you drinking.

What we found through a lot of experimentation, and I’ve written and done some research with some folks that are experts in this area, is that if you are exposing yourself, for example in certain professions, to solvents, heavy perfumes, certain lotions, there are so many things around you that have volatiles that could be picked up on your SCRAM device. I’ve had clients that had a positive reading on a SCRAM, but at the same time they were blowing into an interlock device and getting 0.00 readings. There’s no alcohol on their breath, yet they’re getting these readings on the SCRAM. So it has its use, but you have to be really careful and really knowledgeable if you are ordered to wear one, so that you understand what sort of things in your environment might trigger it.

Also, one way to look at a reading and say this doesn’t look right is that humans absorb and eliminate alcohol in somewhat of a predictable fashion. There are ranges in which a person absorbs an amount of alcohol and then eliminates that amount of alcohol. You’re going to see some outliers sometimes, but generally speaking, it’s a curve. If you plot the data of whatever the transdermal alcohol readings were, then you look at a graph and you say, okay, well, this person’s alcohol was rising at this rate, and then it was eliminating at this rate, and it matches up to what would correspond to human consumption of alcohol. But what happens a lot of times when it’s not alcohol, when it’s some external contaminant, is that you’ll get this chart and the chart doesn’t match up to human absorption and metabolism of alcohol. You’ll have some big drop-off. You’re not going to go from 0.00 to a 0.35 transdermal alcohol in an hour. That’s super unlikely. Likewise, a 0.40 transdermal alcohol level isn’t going to drop down to like a 0.015 in 30 minutes. That’s not humanly possible. So if you look at the readings and you know what you’re looking for, you can say there’s something else going on here. This is not a drinking event. This is some sort of external contaminant.

I know one instance that a friend of mine worked on where it was Static Guard. Literally, they had some blanket and it was real staticky, and they sprayed Static Guard all over it, and then they went to bed, and they had these crazy SCRAM readings on the husband. And then it turned out, if you go and look at the ingredients in Static Guard, it has a lot of denatured alcohol in it. So the instrument was reading ethanol, actually. It was reading alcohol, but it was not coming off that person’s skin. It was coming from the Static Guard.

My advice, for what it’s worth, is if you are ordered to wear a SCRAM device, educate yourself on what external things can cause readings. And to protect myself, if it was me, I’d be blowing into a breath testing device too, so that if anything came up, I’d want to have some records that showed I was blowing triple zeros, so that I could say, hey, there’s no way that I had alcohol in my system, because I’m blowing no alcohol, and there’s something else going on with this device. That would just be me.

There’s also a great program. It’s called the My SCRAM program, which is a series of videos. If you get ordered to have an interlock device or a portable breath testing device or a SCRAM device, there are three different tracks, and you can go pay a nominal fee and watch all these videos. They’re educational videos to help you not have violations of any of those continuous alcohol monitoring devices. In our firm, all clients who get ordered to have SCRAM, interlock, or a handheld device, we put them through that program, because I have found that the more educated the person is, the more they realize what could cause problems for them, the better they do on those monitoring devices. We have fewer people getting in trouble with the court with alcohol violations.

So I hope that helps. There’s more information in the blog if you want to read more about this. If you are on a SCRAM device, bless your heart. Hopefully it’s not on you for very long, because like I said, I’m not much of a fan. I think those devices are very bad for some people, they do cause some injuries on the ankle, and they can be very uncomfortable and difficult to sleep with. All right, you guys take care, and I’ll see you next time. Hopefully you can come watch another one of our videos if you find it useful. Take care.