Coast to coast, authorities are expanding electronic monitoring to fight crime — moving beyond its early use in tracking movements of sex offenders to include gang members who have been released on probation, people accused of repeated violence against women and even truant students at schools. A recent Reuters report noted:
Massachusetts, one of the first states to employ it in 2006, now has about 700 people fitted with electronic bracelets that send signals via satellite to computer servers if they go places they shouldn’t — so-called “exclusion zones.” The Massachusetts law, which allows judges to impose electronic monitoring as a condition of a restraining order, has become a model for states such as Illinois and Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Senate voted 47-0 in April to enlist GPS technology to protect victims of domestic violence. The Illinois House of Representatives unanimously passed similar surveillance legislation last month.
Saving money is one of the main attractions.
GPS is a cost-effective alternative to prison, said Paul Lucci, deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Probation Service, pointing to a chart taped to his office wall showing a state-wide surge in use of GPS — mostly to track sex offenders but also for others. “These people probably should be in jail but the cost of incarceration can be as much as $30,000 or $40,000 a year. The GPS costs about $3,400 a year,” he said. “I think it’s good on both sides. It is a device to protect the public. Although we can’t guarantee anyone’s safety, it provides an extra level of supervision on somebody. On the other side, for a defense attorney, it is in lieu of incarceration,” said Lucci.
However, while wearing a GPS bracelet clearly serves as a deterrent, there seems to be little longterm change in behavior.
North Carolina’s eastern Pitt County, a rural tobacco-growing region of 138,690 people, adopted the technology in late 2005 to relieve overcrowded jails by freeing more accused batterers on bond and tracking them with GPS before they go to trial. It was expanded last year to four more counties. In a measure of success, police dispatchers receive fewer calls involving the same person when an offender wears a GPS bracelet. Pitt County’s recidivism rate for domestic violence fell from 36 percent in 2004 to 14 percent this year, said Sgt. John Guard of local sheriff’s domestic violence unit. But once batterers finish the program and go off GPS, the rate shot back up to around 40 percent, he added.
There are other concerns.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Linfield warned a Harvard Law School panel in February that GPS may offer only a “high tech illusion of safety” that fails to do more to protect women than traditional restraining orders, according to the law school’s newspaper, The Record … “It’s more than just slapping a GPS on a guy. You have to really have an intelligent coordinated approach to it and then it really can save lives,” said Diane Rosenfeld, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped draft the Massachusetts law.
Other uses for GPS, such as pre-trial monitoring, are also increasingly being used. Hamilton County OH, for example, just ordered 200 more units specifically “to help jail overcrowding”. This will push the number of units in Cincinnati to more than 600. Charlotte NC just agreed to increase its monitoring budget by half a million this year to deal with an increase in crime.
vericatrajkova Electronic Monitoring, Illinois, Massachusetts, NC Mecklenburg County, NC Pitt County, OH Hamilton County, Oklahoma
Some nonviolent offenders told to come back later when the jails around Cincinnati OH have room for them aren’t returning. Report from WLWT.
State Sen. Bill Seitz says sweeping prison reform is the only way to reduce overcrowding and ease strain on Ohio’s incarceration budget,