aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Tracked

Proposition 83 easily passed in California. danah explains why it is flawed and shouldn’t have passed but, not surprisingly, it did. More surprisingly, it was immediately challenged in court and enforcement blocked. It’s likely to be found unconstitutional.

The law requires GPS tracking. Wired looks at the state of that art:

The ankle bracelets—usually accompanied by digital-pager-size transmitters—are hardly criminal-proof. Convicts can easily cut the bracelets off and run away as their probation officer gets an alarm and tries to contact the local police. For health reasons, the bracelets aren’t designed to be permanent.

“GPS will not prevent a crime,” said Steve Chapin, CEO of Pro Tech Monitoring, a manufacturer of GPS tracking devices. “It’s a crime deterrent. It has proven to be a good tool, but you can’t oversell it—there’s no physical barrier that it creates that can prevent a crime.”

Pro Tech Monitoring? So policing is outsourced?

Chapin said his Florida-based company tracks about 10,000 people, and he thinks other companies track a few thousand more… There are an estimated 63,000 to 90,000 sex offenders convicted of felonies and misdemeanors in California. According to Chapin, it’s possible that about 20,000 of them will need GPS monitoring under the new law. [...]

Currently, Pro Tech charges $6 to $8 a day for active monitoring, and $4 to $5 a day for passive monitoring, equipment included. At that rate, California can expect to fork out between $80,000 and $160,000 per day to watch its sex offenders, although the ballot measure allows increases in court fees and other costs that offenders are billed.

Among the weaknesses in the system not addressed here is how that “active monitoring” is done. People? Low paid? How qualified? Like TSA screeners at airports? Dont get me wrong, I do not object to technology solutions; I object to technological illusions:

Donald Smith, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, said it’s wrong to rely on technology instead of teaching children to be cautious. “People would like alarms to go off when pedophiles go near their children,” he said. “The real problem is that the pedophile is likely to be their brother, their uncle, their cousin.”

I also object to lifetime monitoring; either they get a l life sentence or they don’t.