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Tracking Sex Offenders via GPS for Life
ecmcn writes "According to Yahoo! news, the governor of Florida just passed a bill that, along with increasing the jail time served for convicted sex offenders, requires them to be tracked for life via GPS. No technical details about the tracking, but it mentions "warning authorities when a sex offender is someplace he shouldn't be". Maybe they can get Google maps to add red zones around all of the restricted areas."
Someone cloned your RFID tag, disabled yours with some sort of shock, went out and did a bunch of sex offending and stuff, then destroyed their copy of the tag?
Seriously it's like sex offenders are any worse then them? I would like to know where a murderer is and a rapist is at all times too so i can avoid that area.
And what about Jessica Lunsford's killer? All he did was cross the street. He wasn't where he wasn't supposed to be until he fled to Georgia. What if his trashmen left his trash cans on the wrong side of the street? Will an alarm go off when he's within 50 yards of a house where a potential victim lives? Imagine taking care of THAT database! Who defines where are the places he's allowed to go? Yes they would have figured out right away that he did it, but it wouldn't have saved her life. If you're going to strip liberties, at least make it worth it. (not-so-subliminal rabidity activation scheme here)
Intelligent Life on Earth
In Calif, tracking is public info. Listed with home address and offense. take a look at meganslaw.ca.gov
And NO, Mr. Jackson isn't listed *yet*
grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
I recently saw a GPS locator made for kids to wear...it would attach to their wrist like a bulky wristwatch and continually broadcast its location.
Now here's an idea...tie the two systems together, so if a kid wearing one of these things comes within 50 feet of a known sex offender, it emits an alarm and/or broadcasts a warning to the parents.
I should be rich.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You know,
I totally agree with you in the slippery slope snowball affect that something like this can have. I do not think that people should be electronically tagged and monitored. I do, however, think that *things*, most things, should be electronically tagged and monitored - like bullets and guns:
All bullets should have an individual tag (serial number) in them that can be read. All guns should have an electronic RFID tag in them that can be read.
When an owner of a gun purchases bullets, the bullets should be also scanned with the gun - or the owner. Then when bullets are fired, we should be able to look up who purchased the bullets. This should not always prove who shot the bullets obviously - but it would put us in the general direction.
I also think that there are a number of other useful applications for RFID. like Luggage, business cards, paper tracking etc...
DISCLAIMER: I work in RFID, I support guns and peoples right to own and buy them. But I also support accountability for ownership. I do not think that just because a tag read indicates an owner, that tag read should also indict an owner.
I think this would be great, becuase the guy who molested my kids was sentenced to 165 years to life (Humboldt County Case #CR030081S, sentenced January 12, 2004, California CDC# V20848, currently residing at Mule Creek State Prison, Ione, California), and he is appealing against the mandatory sentencing guidelines, and if he gets out the GPS will help me hunt him down and kill him...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
...but I worry that it would be the thin edge of the wedge. I'm sure there are many in law enforcement that salivate at the idea of every traffic offender waddling around with a GPS clenched in his buttocks.
I think the correct solution is to keep molesters locked up, or painlessly execute them. They're sick, the sickness makes them dangerous, and we don't know how to cure them. Until we can cure them, we can't have them running loose. It's harsh, but I think doing that would free up resources we could devote to figuring out how to identify and cure these people.
Personally I have no problems with GPS monitoring of sex offenders.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Parent post has been forwarded to the Mule Creek State Prison officials.
Besides the obvious 'those who want to do bad stuff, will be able to remove it', I was amazed at how many of my friends were willing to tag themselves if they had the guarantee that everyone else got tagged too.
I myself am very uncomfortable with the idea itself : Less so, if I got it black-on-white that only a certain radius of a crimescene is used for bringing up the location-data of the people in the whereabouts... Then again, a guarantee given by my (dutch) government, means shit to me.
So who in here would want to 'sacrifice' a little/big bit of his privacy, if you have the guarantee that everyone else gets tagged too ?
In a similar opinion:
My problem is that the current regulations do not discriminate between offences.
1) Go to bar, get drunk, meet girl, bring girl home.
2) Learn next morning she is 17 (still looks like 25) and used fake ID to get in. Also learn her father is a lawyer.
3) Get listed on sex offender list; be tracked with GPS for the rest of your life.
A similar scenario occurred in my area, but with a bar accepting 25 year or older people only. The guy felt safe, she looked at least 25. Being a well known sport hero (making millions a year) the girl literally jumped on him. Next morning she left the hotel room (team was on the road), she bragged around, daddy heard about it and saw the opportunity.
It was explained the only way out would have been to have her and her legal guardian (daddy) sign an agreement for sexual encounter. The fact she used fake ID to get in the bar had no impact, she was a minor, and you are responsible to make sure she was of age, no matter how she acted.
Now calling your lawyer and meet all parties for a signed agreement is not the first thing on your mind when drunk with a girl grabbing your pants under the table.
Until we clearly discriminate between horny young girls and clear violent attacks or pedophile cases, I will have a hard time with harsh regulations imposed post-prison sentenced (debt to society paid and all).
And what happens when a state decides that two 17 year old boys who have sex with each other are sex offenders? The problem is not that violent sex offenders should be monitored. The problem is, who decides who is a sex offender?
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
How much is this going to cost tax payers? Seriously. If this were a tribal society or even america 100 years ago they would have just killed the perpetrator. Someone that cannot stop themselves from their own inclinations needs to be taken out. I'm sorry but with certain crimes there should be little recourse. A $.35 bullet is really cheap considering the tens of thousands we waste housing these monsters and then paying someone to watch their every movement. If you want to rape or molest a child or a baby you can get up to 15 years in prison. That is roughly half a million alone just to house them. Imagine what half a million in scholarships could give a poor community. Imagine how much benefit hundreds of people could see from half a million versus one predator who by his actions has given up his rights to be a part of our society. We would have hung people like this on the spot 100 years ago and why shouldn't we continue to do so? What about the families and the kids whose lives have been destroyed? What recourse do they have? The satisfaction that the man that raped their little 9 year old gets to walk in 10-15 years and potentially ravage some other child along the way?
Sad. Vigalante justice never seemed so appealing.
zosxavius photography
Yep. I've seen cases where a 17 year old boy sleeps with a 15 year old girlfriend. Get's caught... statutory rape conviction. That makes him a sex offender by law. Now, I'm not real pro young kids sleeping with each other, but I'd hardly consider that 17 year old a 'sexual preditor' that needs to be monitored for the rest of his life. That's just wrong. And asking me as a taxpyer to pay for that is crazy.
You're right. That's why I've started suggesting to every potential molester I see that they wait till the kids are at least twelve and a half.
Honestly, the issue isn't if it's wrong or not, and it shouldn't really be about technicalities of who it is. It's about how right it is to track a person FOR LIFE. Do you really think it'll be that long before other crime punishments pick up the same nifty technology if it's allowed for this purpose?
Established law for registration of sex offenders has been applied retroactively to those convicted prior to the laws requiring registration. This has been challenged in court, and the challenges have failed.
I mention this specific issue in this context because the constitution explicitly forbids punishing someone twice for the same crime; the lawmakers and judiciary together came up with the rather creative idea that registration isn't punishment, it's just a matter of record. They reason (and I use the term here in its most sophist character) that since the inevitable further experiences brought on by registration in the form of ostracism, isolation, acts of hatred and so on are applied to the registrant by the citizens -- rather than by the government -- that the government can apply registration without violating the letter of the constitution with specific regard to forbidding applying additional punishment retroactively.
Countering this view is the legislation, quite old now, that forbids posting someone's name on a handbill in the town square, or elsewhere, as a "known criminal" or some such verbiage. These rules apply quite broadly to "public shaming." This used to be common practice amongst the puritans and their ilk, but was made illegal.
It is an interesting set of contrasts; I'm afraid it doesn't speak very well for the lawmaking process.
Almost certainly, the legal system will come up with a similar rationale for tracking. It's not puishment, it's just "locating" or something along those lines, and that'll put the foot in the door.
What one needs to keep in mind here is that if sex offenders can be retroactively registered for life because registration is not punishment, then there is a huge precedent established for the government to register you when you do anything at all, such as get a speeding ticket -- or even if you do nothing at all. It's not punishment according to them, remember that key issue. This is a case where the public's natural (in my view) revulsion for a heinous act has been used against them by the government.
I rather think that if you feel that someone has done something bad enough that you don't trust them out in society, then you shouldn't allow them out in society. Registration, tracking, all of that is locking the barn door after the horse has left, IMHO. And aside from that, I'm sure in my heart that it is constitutionally forbidden, in spirit and in letter. I suspect the founding fathers would have just outright killed anyone caught fooling with their kids and that would have been the end of it right there. Registration, indeed.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not really. I have read research that shows that sex offenders almost never actually reform, so I am honestly in favor of locking up convicted sex offenders for life. This isn't punishment- I honestly feel sorry for people who have a psychological need to commit this kind of behavior- but we have to protect society. If using this kind of tracker makes it possible to safely release sex offenders into the public, I am fully in favor of it.
Now, I know many of you worry about the slippery slope that this introduces, and I am sympathetic to that. Regardless, people should understand that sex offenders are almost always psychologically incapable of avoiding this kind of behavior, so we are forced to choose between putting the public in danger, locking sex offenders up for life, or ingenious and somewhat cruel techniques such as trackers, chemical castration, etc.
I do not have any arms or legs.
All that said, I'm still not a big fan of the death penalty. Since I don't buy into the whole "afterlife" thing, I think death is the easy way out for these people.
John
I remember thinking that when I got one of those police notices of a sex offender moving into my neighborhood. He was convicted of having sex with a girl of 17 while he was 18. The police also rated him as a "high risk to reoffend".
Wouldn't any criminal wanting to get past this just create his own bullets? or remove the tag from the gun? Sounds like a great waste of money that only has the effect of tracking legit gun users.
They're wired wrong. They're defective people. What society needs is to protect itself from these people. Death penalty, life in prison, whatever it takes, just keep them away from the rest of us forever.
Sure, if you can find a way, feel free to end the "punishment" phase of their sentence at 25 years. But the containment needs to be forever. Show me a system that enforces keeping these predators away from innocents while not punishing them, and I'll take that. But a GPS anklet is simply going to lead the cops to the guy who raped another child. And another child is going to be raped. So why did we let him out to reoffend? Because someone believed he could be "rehabilitated."
That's what's wrong with us. We like to believe that some of these human-shaped cockroaches might have some good on the inside, that they can be fixed. But once they've actually committed child rape, that should be enough to permanently identify them as "defective". Permanently.
John
This is where it gets funny. Ballistics experts will testify to just that at trial. But when people talk about registering such patterns in a database, the same experts come out and tell you that these pattens can change from one firing of the gun to the next.
In many states it can be worse... a 15 year old boy can be having sex with his 16 year old gf and the boy would be convicted of statutory.
Sean.OutaHere()
Obviously you don't know jack about the juvenile justice system in America.
Juvenile offenders don't get a trial by jury. A single family court judge decides their guilt or innocence--and whether or not they are labeled a "sex offender" for the rest of their lives. Get a conservative judge--and you get to wear an ankcle bracelet for the rest of your life for banging your 15 year old girlfriend when you were 16.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sweden (where maximum sentences are less than 20 years for any crime) offers sex offenders an option (and some take it since they know that what they're doing is wrong but can't help themselves): Instead of prison time they can have surgery performed and thus both they and society knows that they can be let out and that they'll never commit such crimes again.
Let's GPS-track the white-collar criminals. The CEO's of America who fraudulently misrepresent earnings, or hide income in offshore partnerships, etc.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That is basically what happened to my oldest son when he was 18. He went to a college party and was served alcohol and got wasted. He was walking back to his friend's apartment and stopped and pissed on a bush and a girl in the apartment complex saw him pissing and called the cops. He is now a registered sex offender. He may not have to wear a GPS tracker but he is on the sex offender list.
-- To mess up an OS X box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it.--
Advocating the death penalty is not an intellectually dishonest position nor one which should result in such a screed.
There are numerous people who have committed heinous crimes, the nature of which indicates that they can be neither rehabilitated nor allowed to roam free. Charles Manson is one which immediately springs to mind. Questions of their upbringing or "why they did it" do not matter, these are people who are either truely evil(in this sense totally in disagreement with almost all societal norms and laws, not necessarily in the sense of religion), or simply so freakin' warped they have no hope of being saved. Killing such a person when the evidence is "without a doubt" not simply "without a reasonable doubt", is not necessarily something that should so blithely be dismissed.
By the way, advocating an idea isn't a crime, so your attempt at analogy simply isn't even reasonable.
Sure information wants to be free, but how much are you willing to pay for the packaging?
This starts to sound like the probies in the Uplift universe from David Brin. I hope we get to start uplifting the chimps and dolphins soon. I wonder what the Tymbrimi will look like.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Someone else made a sarcastic remark about tracking other offenders as well, but I have to worry about this measure and related measures as well.
It's actually a great example of another area where security experts need to be involved in.
Clearly the goal is reduce child molestation and sexual offense. Figure out where the risks are, what's important, what's not, put laws/programs/whatever in place to deal with the risks and issues.
Politicians don't work like that. The media drools over some sorta rare situation, politicians jump into action to make laws more stringent than the laws that were already on the books. I can tell you one thing, if the horse has already run out of the barn, it doesn't matter how hard you slam the barn door.
What we need is good data.
In spite of what local politicians say, recidivism of sexual offenders is low. (google "sex offender recividism" and parse the info yourselves.)
But I want more complex data than just that...in order to assess risk properly, and put everything in the correct context. For instance:
*Apparently the true serial sexual predator is a very rare situation. We are most afraid of it, with little justification. How common is the true serial sexual predator?
*We have a lot of law enforcement resources locked up in chld pornagraphy--catching those who make real child porn (for good reason) and catching those who consume it. How much is the latter a threat? How likely are they be an actual molester? What's the statistical likelyhood that a child would be molested by an individual that has a taste for child porn. (I incidentally heard somewhere that 2% of Americans have a taste for child porn, but I've not heard that again? Answers?)
*Next, I've heard some evidence to suggest that the majority of child molestaters have only engaged in acts with one child. These individuals have actually not had any significant attraction towards any other children, nor do they after their molestation of the child in question. Further, they are most often relatives or friends of the child/parents, and so know the child well. (I've got a theory here...these people did not have a single bit of pedophilia in them, but something about this child makes their brain go *ping* and things go downhill from there.) So what's the statistical evidence on this?
This is an important thing to know. If your child is slight/significantly/astronomically more liklely to be molested by an individual who has not shown any prior-disposition to children in the past, and further, is likely already known and trusted by you (the parent) then the sexual offender databases and pink license plates serve as a tragic distraction from where the risk actually lies.
Anybody got any information out there?
We used to be a lot more sensible about this: if you so aggregiously attacked society that you've essentially declared a permanent contempt for it and willingness to harm it, then you get something special: like being a laborer for life. You know, the salt mines, that sort of thing. Now we've got all these great labor saving devices, so it sort of takes the fun out of knowing that child rapists are breaking up rocks to make road gravel (meaning, it's not cost efficient, so they're still a drain on society, not a cheap asset). I've seen programs where lifers are put to work doing things like making wiring harnesses or other actitivies for which it remains difficult to employ robots. Sounds like a great alternative to outsourcing some manufacturing to China, if you ask me.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
True, a pedophile is a state of being, much like being gay. Like being gay it is usually fixed. Sure, some people swing from gay to straight or vice-versa over a lifetime, and I'm sure some people swing to- or from- being a pedophile over their lives, but not many.
However, not everyone who has sex with children is a pedophile.
Some men have sex with their own daughters because they are the most "available" person around. Remove children from the house, or if a wife steps in, and the problem goes away.
Others are not attracted to chilren but rather people much younger than themselves - the 25 year old who wants to marry a 10 year old girl may, a decade later, want to marry that same now-legal 20 year old woman, and be happy as her husband 40 years later.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Cars are already tagged through a variety of methods, and the owner is ultimately accountable through those methods. If I steal a car and run people down, we at least know where the car came from so we can find out where the car was stolen.
Goods NEED to be tagged for inventory. They already are in some manor or another. And no one is saying to put the tags IN the inventory, just next to it. Put the RFIDs on the shoe box, not the shoes, or a tag attached to the shoes. No one is doing inventory on the shoes inside the box. You're also assuming Wal-Mart cares that you (the shoe owner) is back in the store. Casinos track every single move you make from entering the place to leaving it (though supposedly not in the bathroom or bedroom, who knows, right?). I haven't received too many pop up ads walking in there (I'm guessing the high rollers do in the form of casino hosts.)
Finally, the gun argument is the same as cars. We tag guns to owners via registered serial #s. If a gun is stolen, we at least know where the gun was bought, when it was stolen, etc. That assumes we have the gun. If we could find a way to embed RFID inside bullets, not just on the casing, that would be cool too, as not many people stop and dig the bullets out after they shoot someone.
Tagging sex offenders sounds like a great idea when you think about it, but the slippery slope is there and waiting for us. Sex offenders automatically have less rights for life based on their type of crime (murderers dont' register everywhere they go once they're paroled or finished serving time, and their crime is far worse). I'm guessing the fact that we haven't extended Meghan's Law to non-sex offenders helps the argument that this would remain amongst sex offenders.
And on a final note, I heard some sorta research (but can't locate) that there's about a 2% disposition toward child porn. That's 1/50 of Americans.
As a caveat, note that pictures of naked 16 year olds counts as "child porn" in most jurisdictions. Completely ignoring the fact that they have well developed secondary sexual charachteristics (e.g. boobs), are perfectly capable of reproduction, and throughout most of history have been seen as prime spousal material.
It is only recently that that the age group has been deemed "too young." Look at Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet":
Mrs. Capulet: "[Juliet] has not seen the sum of fourteen years. Let two more summers wither in their pride, 'ere we think her ripe to be a bride."
Mr. Capulet: "Younger than she are happy mothers made."
It's difficult to go back upon thousands of years of evolution. (That said, anyone trying to use this defense in court deserves to get laughed at.)
This whole tracking child molesters thing is absurd. No, I'm not defending these scumbags, so hear me out.
What makes a sexual offender or predator any more dangerous than a convicted murderer or rapist? Why should one have to announce their presence in a neighborhood and not live x miles from schools but not the other? Both are potentially dangerous. The murderer or rapist won't care that the girl or boy next door is 16 or 19.
Both were convicted and served their time. Period. If we're not going to track EVERYONE convicted of those types of crimes, then we should'nt be tracking any of them.
This is just as one sided as cities that post lists of the "johns" convicted of prostitution but never post a list of the prostitutes. They were both convicted; list them both.
There was just a thing on the news about the new Ohio law that gave authorities the power to arrest, try, evict, or move child molesters or predators that live within x number of miles from a school. This includes people who own their homes, and lived in these places long before the schools in question were built.
Like I said, I'm defending their actions, but I think the whole mess is too lobsided.
you would think that limiting it to crimes against children 11 and younger would limit this law to only genuine, dangerous criminals. Unfortunatly, people get locked up in the USA for taking pictures of their babies splashing around in the bathtub - It's clearly child pornography according to the law in many states. I'm not joking, people really go to prison for taking pictures of their kids playing in the tub or similar benign activities. I've seen so many decent people get cruelly mistreated by the USA government, it makes me feel sick. Thank god slashdotters recognize what's going on and don't just pretend the only people in jail are bad people.
GPS units receive signals and triangulate their position using those. The thing about this is that they're entirely passive. A GPS emits absolutely no RF signal [which is why you can use them on airplanes without any worry of interference] and is thus impossible to track.
A tracking device could use GPS as a means to find its location. However, it would require the use of some other system in order to be possible to track. In other words, the wearer of the tracking device would need to send out some sort of a homing beacon before it's even possible to be tracked.
A very good friend of mine was raped. How's that for perspective?
It's always fun to see people argue by attacking the person with whom they disagree. It immediately tells me you're a bullshit dittohead who has a warped idea of how the world "should" be, and is trying to conform others to that idea. You cannot violate the rights of others, just so you can sleep better at night. How fucking hard is that to understand? Are you really this retarded?
You're making assumptions about me personally, based on a post on a message board. Think about that for a second.
You accuse me of ignorance, yet you offer no topical argument beyond "you're an asshat, join the real world".
So, my advice to you, Mr. Erik Carlsteen of San Diego (tel: 1-619-283-4331), is this:
Get your head out of your ass and stop listening to Sean Hannity.
Oh, and learn some fucking netiquette... or as we call them in the "real world", manners.
-- This sig for rent.
Don't forget that whoever is the legal guardian of that 15y olds will be in deep shit.
A friend of a co-worker of mine helped to watch the kids on a school trip. Kids, being the usual naughty monkeys, had mayhem on their minds. Too bad, instead of the usual drinking binge, they decided to have sex. The kids were housed in a number of 4-bed cottages, when the guy entered one of the houses, he saw those four kids have group sex. One 14y old, one 13y and two 12y olds.
The shit happened. The 13y old girl got pregnant. And, the guy now has to financially support the baby until it gets 18y, as he was responsible for the kids at the time.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Really? When have you seen people sent to prison for taking bathtub pictures of their babies? Name one case.
Anyone remember the start of the second Iraq war? When the U.S. government, being the only ones in control of GPS, decided to turn down the accuracy for all non-US military signals in order to stop any Iraqis from using off the shelf GPS gear against them?
I'm looking forward to Operation Someone Else Has Oil Freedom - the maps change from nice reassuring dots to three hundred plus yard wide shaded circles. With a large enough number of sex offenders (consensual BDSM, urinating against a tree when drunk, girls who lied about their age), the entire state of Florida will turn in to a great big glowing hot spot and the entire population'll freak out.
Given the choice: reassuring themselves that knowing where these people are makes a difference vs. slightly cheaper oil... which side will the average middle American fall on? Will they still accept war if it means turning down the accuracy of their knee-jerk response system for a while?
Hey, if one form of stupidity that only hurts their own citizens prevents another form of stupidity that hurts other countries' citizens, is it such a terrible thing?
If she doesn't come home from school on time, has she abducted a child?
Freedom: "I won't!"
I bet you statistically, 95% to 99% of sex offenders are male. On a side note, I would love to be molested by a female sex offender.
This was modded as funny. But there is a very serious side to it. There are an awful lot of double standards which distort perceptions. e.g. could anyone imagine a man being treated the same way as Mary Kay Letourneau?
It's even been known for victims to have to lie that they were molested by a man, because no-one will believe they were molested by a woman or even that they are making false accusations...
There's also the problem that many laws here are implicitally (even explicitally ) sexist. Sometimes even the victim is male or female can make a difference as to what the perpetrator can be changed with.
Finally there's the senario of a woman raping a man and telling him "do anything about it and I'll tell the police you raped me. Who do you think they'll believe?"