A self-described former gang member in a silver and black Bo Jackson Raiders jersey and Nike high tops strutted into an Oakland parole office Thursday morning to get a new GPS unit strapped around his ankle. Sergio, 43, said he wasn’t happy to represent one of the new frontiers of state corrections. The anklet he has worn 24 hours a day for the past two months, he said, made him feel like a dog on a leash. Story, with additional photos, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Like in the cartoons,” said Sergio, who declined to give his last name, “where the dog gets shocked if he crosses the line.”

For corrections officials, that’s the whole point. Sergio is one of 40 paroled gang members in Alameda County, and one of 800 statewide, that agents began tracking in January – marking a major expansion of a GPS program first used on paroled sex offenders.

The program aims to monitor 1,000 parolees by year’s end, officials said, at roughly $9,500 each annually.

Officials touted the program Thursday in the midst of Operation Gangbusters, a multiagency sweep. By the late afternoon, parole agents and police officers had arrested 48 people, seized two guns and two machetes, and picked up four parolees who had allegedly absconded from supervision.
Protest was off-limits

The officials made clear how strict the GPS monitoring can be. Sergio’s parole agent can see his every move. And the agent can punish him if, for example, he crosses into old stomping grounds in San Leandro, or congregates with other GPS-strapped parolees.

Mark Morris, 22, who also had his GPS unit updated Thursday, said the plastic device served as a constant visual reminder to stay out of trouble. “It helps me think more about what I’m doing,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing.”

In early July, said Robert Ambroselli, director of adult parole for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, gang members wearing the units were prohibited from entering Oakland’s downtown area during the protests that followed the verdict in the trial of former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle.

A violation can mean a return to prison.

“Now they know my every move,” complained Sergio, who said he was no longer a gang member. “Now I just stay to myself and my female friends and whatnot.”

Corrections officials are under pressure to achieve success in their growing GPS venture, which some critics have called too pricey given the state’s budget crunch.

Agents’ use of the technology was criticized after the arrest of Phillip Craig Garrido, the man accused of kidnapping Jaycee Dugard in 1991 and imprisoning her in his backyard near Antioch.

Garrido, a paroled sex offender, was outfitted with a GPS anklet in April 2008 but was not closely watched. The case showed that the devices are often only as effective as the human beings who use them.

While Garrido was under “passive monitoring,” the parolee gang members are watched more closely. Their movements are not viewed in real time, but agents often look back at and scrutinize a full day of GPS “tracks.”
Tracking ‘worst of worst’

Ambroselli said the device serves as a “scarlet letter,” letting others know that a parolee is being monitored by police. At any time, an agent can flip open a laptop computer and watch as a screen of blinking dots and arrows shows them where their gang members are located.

“It isolates them from their network,” Ambroselli said. “It sends a message to gang members and their associates: ‘We’re watching you.’ ”

Officials are also intrigued by the potential for making arrests through “crime scene correlation,” comparing GPS tracks with crime reports to see if a gang member was at a scene – a shooting or robbery, for example – at a specific time.

According to state corrections officials, about 20,000 parolees in California are validated as gang members. But “only the most dangerous guys get anklets,” said John Bent, a supervisor parole agent in Alameda County. “They’re the worst of the worst.”
Electronic eye on parolees

For one of Bent’s agents, Brett Everidge, the technology is another tool to confirm whether a parolee is living within the law.

“It’s easy for them to say they’re doing the right thing, not hanging out with the wrong crowd, or hanging out in places where they shouldn’t,” Everidge said. “But this technology helps prove it.”

Sergio said he had served two years in Corcoran State Prison in Kings County for discharging a firearm in public. He said he was a gang member in his youth.

Sergio said friends who visited him often made fun of his GPS unit, prompting him to consider decorating an item that is becoming an increasingly common accessory.

“I asked my (parole officer) if I could put some bling on it,” Sergio said. “He said it was OK, as long as it still worked. Maybe I’ll put a Raiders sticker on it.”

jchev California, Electronic Monitoring, GPS, Parole

Several years ago, California decided to require high-risk parolees, such as gang members and sex offenders, to wear GPS monitoring devices. The idea was to relay location information to law enforcement to ensure that the convicts stay where they’re supposed to. Unfortunately, the state often misses those alerts, making the devices both a lesson in the pitfalls of technology management and a massive exercise in largely useless spending. News from CBS Business Network.

In 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger first supported a pilot program to track 500 sex offenders and alert authorities if one of them wandered too far from home. California voters passed a ballot initiative, nicknamed Jessica’s Law, in 2006 that prohibited sex offenders from being within 2,000 feet of a school or park and required all offenders to wear monitoring devices for the rest of their lives. By this year, the state wanted to expand monitoring to a thousand paroled gang members at a cost of $9,500 a year for each one.

The move expands what is already the nation’s biggest Global Positioning System monitoring program of convicts, coming three years after voters required satellite tracking of more than 7,000 paroled sex offenders.

Unfortunately, the technology, as California implemented it, didn’t work. The case of convicted sex offender Leonard Scroggins shows the system’s problem. Scroggins cut the tracking device off his ankle and allegedly tried to rob or kidnap several women and girls over a two-day period. The device sounded an alarm and parole officers pushed through the paperwork for an arrest warrant, but the process took nearly 24 hours. Even then, police would only learn of the warrant if they picked up Scroggins for some other reason and then checked the appropriate database.

Computers can automatically route signals to the proper people in law enforcement. Nevertheless, parole officials have left tens of thousands of electronic alerts unresolved:

Officials say the backlog grew because they lacked software to run an ongoing report of all unresolved cases. That is, supervisors in Southern California were working only with reports of new alarms, rather than a report showing previous alarms that had not been cleared.

Officials clearly didn’t have a desktop database or spreadsheet to filter and analyze the alerts, and so they were buried in unexamined data.

According to Petra Fuhriman, owner of GPS Monitoring Solutions, a monitoring consulting and services company never involved in the state’s system, California chose a passive alert system. Notifications from the monitoring devices automatically go to parole officers. However, there is no differentiation among different types of alerts. A device could as easily signal that it had been removed or that the battery was running down. Someone might be on a highway, technically in a restricted area but actually passing by at high speed — or stuck in traffic, where it might look like they were loitering.

Fuhriman says that that parole officers’ phones and email in-boxes “are flooded with these messages, so they become desensitized and stop paying attention.” The state could write software to prioritize the messages, based on the type of alert and the frequency of notification to help the officers choose the most important alerts, but it apparently hasn’t.

Alerts also do little good when parole personnel are off-duty on a weekend and no one receives a message until the following Monday. Some companies provide real-time monitoring, with outsourced first level screening of alerts and officer notification for serious issues, but that is more expensive.

And so California, like so many institutions and organizations, looked to technology as a silver bullet siren, but failed to undertake the operational changes necessary to make it work. Officials cost-cut the original good idea to the point where it was all but useless.

jchev California, Electronic Monitoring, GPS, Parole

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has begun fitting paroled gang members with GPS monitors to better keep track of criminals considered to be among the worst of the worst. Reported in the Whittier Daily News.

By the end of the year, about 260 paroled gang members are expected to be placed on GPS monitoring in Los Angeles County, officials said.

“We’re trying to attempt to deter parolees from being involved in future gang activities,” said Barnard Villar, unit supervisor of the Pasadena parole office.

“It also serves to track the activities of those who fail to abide by their conditions or stay away from other gang members.”

The GPS tracking devices on the first group of gang members in the Pasadena area were activated May 11, Villar said.

Seventeen known gang members are now being monitored in the Pasadena area, with three more expected by next week, parole unit supervisor Barnard Villar of the Pasadena area office said.

To be placed on GPS monitoring, parolees must be officially recognized as gang members both in prison and on the streets, Villar said. Both new parolees and people paroled in the past may be fitted with the devices.

The devices may be used to make sure paroled gang members don’t congregate with each other, he said, or violate their parole by entering a restricted area, such as a gang injunction zone.

Additionally, Villar said, the stored information from the GPS devices can be used in an investigation if a monitored parolee is suspected of a crime or parole violation.

Parole officials contract with an outside company to monitor the GPS trackers and send out alerts when a violation is observed, Villar said. Parole agents also have real-time access to the information provided by the GPS bracelets, which track the exact location of the wearers via satellite 24 hours a day.

California parole officials have been placing high-risk gang member parolees on GPS monitoring for several years, officials said, but legislation signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in October expanded the program to place 1,000 gang member parolees on GPS monitoring statewide.

The legislation was the same bill that mandated more than 20,000 parolees considered to be low-risk be released with minimal parole supervision, or “non-revocable parole.”

While about 160 paroled gang members were being monitored by GPS prior to the new legislation, officials plan to increase that number to 1,000 by the end of the year, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation District Administrator Maria Franco said.

Local parole offices have been implementing the additional GPS devices as staff training allows since the law took effect Jan. 25, Franco added.

While Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich has expressed differences of opinion with state parole officials in the past, the gang member GPS monitoring program is a program the supervisor supports, said his spokesman, Tony Bell.

“While the supervisor has had issues with the state’s non-revocable parole, this program has merit,” he said.

GPS tracking devices are being used as an additional means of oversight for parolees, Franco said. They are not being used to shorten the sentences of any inmates.

Antonovich’s justice deputy, Anna Pembedjian, said the increased use of GPS to track high-risk gang members benefits public safety.

“Certainly we would rather them be on GPS than not,” she said. “It enhances community safety because it can hold these parolees more accountable to the terms of parole.”

Parole officials have been running a pilot program out of offices in Alameda and Huntington Park for the past two years with positive results, Franco said.

In addition to using the system to provide law enforcement officials with valuable information for their investigations, she said, “We were able to use it to prevent felonies from occurring.”

jchev CA Los Angeles County, GPS

State corrections officials are increasing the use of satellite tracking for gang members on parole. News from the Union Tribune.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation currently monitors about 160 high-risk gang members. With new legislation this year, the department plans to increase that to 1,000.

“California has taken a bold step in focusing its attention and resources on those gang members identified as posing the highest risk to the public,” said the department’s secretary, Matthew Cate. “We are committed to improving supervision of gang members which will help increase public safety.”

As part of a gang sweep in Fresno and Clovis, concluded Wednesday, 80 new gang members were outfitted with the global positioning system ankle bracelets. The department says lower supervision of non-serious, non-violent and non-sex offenders has allowed better supervision of those deemed higher risk.

jchev California, Electronic Monitoring, GPS

Robeson County NC officials hope a new monitoring program and hiring additional jailers will address issues at the county jail.  Reported by the Fayetteville Observer.

The county Board of Commissioners has approved hiring eight jailers and allocated more than $200,000 for a monitoring program in the proposed fiscal 2010 budget. Officials say the additional jailers will meet the state’s requirement on physically monitoring inmates. The new GPS monitoring program would reduce crowding at the jail and allow nonviolent offenders to be monitored at home instead of being incarcerated. There are about 420 inmates at the jail, which is a 409-bed facility. It opened in 1992 with 250 inmates. The jail population ranges from 400 to 440 inmates a day.

A state inspector told jail officials earlier this year to change the way they observe inmates. The inspector with the state Division of Health Service Regulation says jailers should be checking on inmates in person twice an hour. Jailers now observe each inmate at least twice an hour on an irregular basis by looking through the glass on the cell door. John Harkins, the chief inspector with the Jails and Detention Section, said jailers must follow the North Carolina Administrative Code and check on each inmate twice an hour in person …

The county plans to hire four jailers this fall and four more in January or February, Windley said. The proposed budget allocates $175,000 for the positions … Officials felt two to three jailers would be needed to make the rounds instead of one to meet the state requirements …

The GPS program calls for nonviolent offenders, such as those owing child support, to be monitored through a GPS system rather than being placed in the jail. The county is allotting about $274,000 for the program, which is modeled after one in Pitt County. It will require two employees. Two road deputies will help administer the program when needed … The program is slated to start in January.

jakking Accreditation, Community Corrections, Electronic Monitoring, GPS, NC Robeson County, Overcrowding

A political fight that erupted last week at Cincinnati City Council over buying more ankle bracelets to monitor low-level criminal offenders obscured a basic truth, according to the Hamilton County OH sheriff.  Even if the city and the county purchase electronic monitoring units by the hundreds, it’s only a temporary fix.  Report from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

“No amount of EMU’s can replace the 800-bed jail we had to close,” Sheriff Simon Leis Jr. said. The bracelets, he said, relieve just some of the problems … Budget woes forced the sheriff to close the 800-bed Queensgate jail last year, reducing the jail system’s capacity by a third …

The fight began after some Cincinnati council members wanted to use part of $1.2 million in stimulus money given to the city by the U.S. Department of Justice to lease 75 electronic monitoring units, a tool that allows a suspect or convict to be monitored while living at home. But Mayor Mark Mallory sent that proposal to committee, meaning it will likely die without a hearing. Those new units would have come on top of 75 electronic monitoring units the county plans to lease with its own $1.2 million in stimulus dollars. Those would be on top of the 440 units already in use.

In Leis’ view, 75 or even 150 units won’t have a major impact. “It is just a temporary stop-gap,” he said. “There’s just no way this criminal justice problem can be solved without jail beds.”

What pushed the issue out front last week was the arrest of Miciah Black, a 20-year-old who was repeatedly ordered jailed on minor offenses, but repeatedly released due to overcrowding. While out, he is accused of raping a teenager in Lytle Park in downtown Cincinnati.   Since Jan. 1, the sheriff said he has had to release 8,571 prisoners, either immediately after arrest (the person is told to go to court), by telling people to come back and serve their sentence later, or by releasing them before their sentence is up.

Most counties [in Ohio] use at least a few electronic monitoring units. Warren County court officials say more than 600 offenders were supervised on electronic monitoring in 2008. Clermont County uses 10-20 units on any given day but hopes to use more in the future, officials there said. Butler County uses about 25 of the devices at a time … Hamilton County uses about 300 each day …

Last Tuesday, three judges went to council’s law committee meeting and begged for council’s help, saying closing Queensgate emboldened criminals who know unless their crime is serious there’s a good chance they’ll be released right after arrest and possibly not ever serve a sentence.Hamilton County Municipal Judge Bernie Bouchard, one of the three judges who testified before council, said the monitors are not the long-term solution, but they are the “best solution right now.”

jakking Early Release, Economic Issues, Electronic Monitoring, GPS, OH Clermont County, OH Warren County, RFID

An ankle bracelet monitoring system could soon become the remedy for curbing the surging population at the Gaston County NC Jail.

Sheriff Alan Cloninger wants the county to lease 100 of the bracelets, which rely on GPS technology to monitor the location of suspects and criminals who would otherwise be locked up. He hopes to use the devices on a two-year trial while tracking the system’s effectiveness.   Judges would have discretion over when to allow use of the bracelets. People charged with acts of domestic violence or arrested for failing to appear in court would be likely candidates, Cloninger said.

Leasing 100 bracelets would cost an estimated $240,000 a year, Cloninger said. County commissioners are expected to vote on the investment Feb. 26, but they are concerned about additional personnel Cloninger also requested to run the program. Nine and a half new positions – including five deputies, two telecommunicators and a sergeant – would be needed, Cloninger said …

The Gaston County Sheriff’s Office receives $60 per inmate per day to house federal prisoners at the jail. But an overpopulation of local and state inmates often prevents them from taking full advantage of that lucrative program.   Freeing up 100 beds for federal prisoners could allow the ankle bracelet program to pay for itself, he said.    “I don’t know of any other way to reduce the jail population in a quick manner,” he said.

Ankle bracelets are the first in a three-phase approach Cloninger has recommended to address jail overcrowding.   The second phase would involve “infilling” unused recreation space in the jail with 70 new beds. The upgrade would cost about $6.5 million for design and construction, and would take 18 months to two years to complete, said Gaston County Manager Jan Winters.   Cloninger’s third phase calls for a larger 440-bed expansion that could cost $70 million, although federal economic stimulus money could bring that expense down.   Another option might be to add 140 beds with another level on the current jail, although it is uncertain that the foundation could support the extra weight, Cloninger said …

“The issue is how do we delay building a new multi-million-dollar jail,” Winters said. “Can we save money by avoiding or delaying construction?”    The average daily population at the Gaston County Jail rose from 449 inmates in 2004, to 541 inmates in 2008, Cloninger said. The jail has 584 beds, but its prisoner total often pushes 580 or 590 – especially on weekends and during the summer, Cloninger said. Exceeding capacity violates state law.

There is a lot more operational detail at the Gaston Gazette.

jakking Electronic Monitoring, GPS, NC Gaston County, North Carolina, Overcrowding