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RFID Bracelets to Track Inmates in L.A. County
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to RFID Journal, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is about to launch a pilot program to track 1,800 inmates using RFID devices. If the test is successful, the technology will be deployed for the 18,000 inmates of the L.A. county jails. With this system, inmates carry a wrist bracelet which issues a signal every two seconds and is caught by RFID readers installed everywhere in the prison. Officers and staff also carry a RFID device attached to their belts. And a central server keeps track in real time of the position of all prisoners and guardians. Besides tracking locations, the system also intends to reduce violence within the jail and to avoid escapes. If this system works as its promoters think, the potential market to equip all federal, state and county jails in the U.S. exceeds $1 billion. This overview contains other details and references, including a picture of a wristwatch transmitter worn by inmates."
This has nothing to do with my rights; I am not a prisoner. It is, however, a good use of the technology, and one of the first I've heard of.
Finally, a reason for RFID to exist.
great! now i can walk straight out of my local grocery store without the inconvenience of having to stop and pay for my prison inmate!
Make them out of plastic, and yellow. Then all the inmates will want to wear them!
but isn't it just slightly weird they dont know where they are now?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
This is marked by a sudden decrease of the value of Penthouse rags while tinfoil becomes a precious metal.
This sig is false.
I have been thinking lately about crime and punishment. We have two reasons for sending people to prison in the first place:
(1) To punish them.
(2) To reform them.
Both of these purposes have been lost completely.
We punish the prisoners by secluding them from society, cutting them away for a period of time in proportion to the seriousness of their crime.
We reform them by teaching them new habits and skills that will help them survive beyond the prison walls without returning to crime.
What does this have to do with either? Absolutely nothing. I'd rather we spent our prison budget on working to enhance the education and reformation of the prisoners rather than keeping track of where they are at all times, something that we don't have a problem with right now.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
From TFA:
So, if you lose some weight, you could slip it off, pass it to your buddy who gets it in contact with his skin within 15 seconds, go do your crime, and get away with it.See what I've been reading.
If you're of the camp that believes prison is for rehabilitation, enhanced freedom could be used as an effective tool to accomplish that. Prisoners that can be tracked wherever they are in prison is a necessary requirement to grant this enhanced freedom.
On the other hand, if you think prison is punishment, look at the transmitters as yet another way to make sure everybody is accounted for, and a way to gather evidence for crimes in the building.
Using RFID to track inmates? What are they trying to do, turn our jails into prisons?
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
No, if the system was designed with any sanity, it will sound an alarm the moment the sensors lose track of the bracelet.
Unfortunately, if I know anything about human behaviour, the guards will disable these alarms instead of investigating them. And this will render this system worthless.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
And what happened to the magnetic boots? Can't run a future prison without magnetic boots!
You must think in Russian.
Now all they gotta do is rig an explosive charge to it so that it'll go off if the prisoner strays beyond the prison perimeter... ... oh wait, that was Running Man...
"Here is your Sub Zero, now, just plain Zero!"
Sounds like you're never been in a prison.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Tracking the guards allows a display of where they all are, so as to identify gaps in the patrol structure. Knowing where they should be is helpful; knowing where they are exactly is even better. In addition, this may allow rapid action if several personnel are seeing congregating rapidly on one location (perhaps stopping a fight) just in case transmission is difficult or impossible due to circumstances.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If it works to improve safety and reduce escapes, then it results in lower costs through greater public safety, lower prison hospital bills, and fewer lawsuits against the state over effects of prison violence.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
this article reminded me I need to make up a greasemonkey script to block all stories submitted by Roland Piquepaille
thanks
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
It wasn't so long ago the Sheriff released a bunch of convicts because they couldn't afford to keep them in jail. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20050419- 0444-ca-labudget.html
/. the server connected to the network of readers?
It wasn't so long ago (months?) that inmates were dying at a rather alarming rate in L.A. Sheriff's jails too. I wish I had a link, but it was very news-worthy on LA public radio. (KPCC covers L.A. news great) The phrase "Sheriff's excessive use of force" never quite stuck.
I wonder what the resource requirements are for a system that "tracks convicts wherever they go in real-time" claim. Presumably thousands of reader devices always on and connected to some server. Is there a database backend? Or, does it just store locations temporarily. Could you
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
First they RFID'd the prisoners. I was not a prisoner, so I did not care.
Then they RFID'd the paroles and probationers. I was not a parolee or probationer, so I did not care.
Then they RFID'd the sex offenders. I was not a sex offender, so I did not care.
Then they RFID'd the ex-felons. I was not an ex-felon, so I did not care.
Then they RFID'd everyone. There was nobody left to care about me.
Apologies to Martin Niemoeller.
Seriously, this does have utility in prisons and perhaps with high-risk parolees, probationers, and highly-likely-to-reoffend ex-cons, but society has to make some hard "dark line" decisions to make sure this doesn't become a slippery slope.
PS: Will the next version be an implant with the number 666 on it?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why, it'll become impossible to cheat on your spouse, as she'll only need to go to an online tracking system with her mouse, type in your National ID number, and see who you are boinking.
If your political views differs from the Status Quo, yes, your government will be interested in that too! Wonderful. Orwell had no idea. At least in 1984 there were places you could go to avoid the cameras. Now, there's nowhere we can go.
Couple that with closed-circuit cameras being everywhere in public, face recognition tecnology getting better and better, and Bush slipping his henchmen in place over the years, and you have...? All non-republicans take note!!!!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
So this is supposed to make it easier for inmates to stalk each other using RFID technology. Great plan.
Ok, so check out what's going to happen. A dude is going to chop off like 20 people's hands and toss them down laundry chutes, catapult them over fences, attach them to radio controlled cars, etc. just to simulate as if these people are escaping. Then he/she is going to escape quietly via some other route when the guards are all chasing hands. Or am I crazy?
Of course not.
It has the number 616 on it instead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
People in prison have lost their liberty.
They do not have freedom. They committed some violation of rules that society has deemed it neccesary that they be locked up. Away from society. It is VERY important to public security that their whereabouts be known at all times while in prison. It is also VERY hard to do with 18,000 inmates and only a few hundred (maybe thousand) correctional officers.
This is NOT the first step on a slipperly slope. The government doesn't really care that at 1PM every day, I go take a shit. There's no way even if they DID care that they could seriously mark every citizen with an RFID and track their whereabouts, Real-ID or not. They can't even keep track of how many illegal immigrants there are!
Remember, we still do afford a certain amount of control on our government. If they DID try to monitor every citizen's whereabouts, it would be shot down by the general public even if the only reason is their taxes would go up.
Please remove the tin foil hat, because in this case, it's too damn expensive.
The guards in my office building already have to stop at electronic checkpoints while they are on patrol, so the supervisors know the guards are actually patrolling. RFID would just make this more continuous.
Your argument requires a strong leap at the last step, also worth note the last step is the largest step and the least likley, in the original argument the steps were smaller and the last one not so big. My only worry about these is that it might make the guards complacent, or more likley cut the number of guards leading to scary new problems that will be hard to resolve with the fewer guards.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Here you go
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
This last weekend, I was robbed at gunpoint. The assailant took my wallet and my cell phone. The first thing I did after calling the police (at a land line) was call my banks to turn off my various cards. As the police officer was writing down his report, my sister on the phone with the bank discovered that someone had tried to use one of my cards 5 minutes after the robbery at a 7-11 down the street from the hold up.
The 7-11 had a video camera recording everything, and now that the cops had my description and a video surveillance image to go off of, their chances of catching the criminal are pretty high (though I was told that it was highly unlikely that I'd ever see my phone, wallet, or the IDs in the wallet ever again).
Because of modern anti-theft measures, the man who stuck a gun in my stomach is most likely going to end up in jail. The fast-acting real-time monitoring of credit card usage, the ever present video surveillance, and the fast response time of the police from my initial 911 call all are aiding to the apprehension of this guy who, all told, ended up with about $30 in cash and a phone that can never be activated again.
And yet, the more I think about it, the more I'm deeply disturbed. Yes, it was nice to know that because of our modern world, the guy didn't end up running up thousand dollar bills on my credit card. And yes, I do take comfort knowing that it's highly likely the guy will go to jail.
But at what cost? Every day we are giving up more and more privacy under the auspicious of safety, yet nobody in any position of power seems to consider that perhaps the government and corporate organizations of America shouldn't have that much access to our private lives.
I asked myself the question: What if I was on the other side of that technological dragnet? What if the government was after me because I said something that the government didn't agree with, or saw as a "threat", despite my benign intentions? What if, say, I made a remark publicly that I didn't think the current presidential administration was pursuing policies that have America's best interests in mind? What if I was in a position where people respected what I had to say, and would take it to heart? What if the administration decided to find me and silence me?
Granted, these "what ifs" are generally the bread and butter of the tin foil hat crowd, but it does make me uneasy. When I was a kid, my parents had a chip put in my dog. Now they're putting them on wrist bands of prisoners. It doesn't take a genius to come to the conclusion that eventually all prisoners will have these, then all prisoners will have these implanted, then the citizenry will have them.
I can hear someone saying "Look, if you had a chip implanted in you with your ID and bank account information on it, you would have never been mugged, and you wouldn't have to be going through the hassle of getting your IDs and life back in order right now". Then again, the guy could have just shot me and dug out my chip with a dull knife. I'm not sure.
What I am sure of is this: We still live in a pretty good country. As misguided as I think their policies are, I still think most of the current government's activities are still in the best interests of the American people. But what is the otherwise respectable "done nothing wrong" citizen supposed to do if America's power is seized from them by people who don't mind trampling on personal liberties one bit to serve their own purpose? Things like RFID tags just adds to our impotency if the time comes when decent Americans have to raise up against our own government and set things right again.
I for one am willing to lose a little more money in a robbery, or have the knowledge that the chances that the guy who robbed me gets caught is lower in exchange for the safety in knowing that if things ever get really bad, I have some options in standing up to the government.
The Internet is generally stupid
There is no slippery slope. A fundamental part of any civilized society is a social contract (Locke); if an individual in the society chooses to break that contract by comitting a crime, he/she is ostracized from the society. Over the past few hundred years we've codified this into penal codes. Granted, there are injustices in the penal code (i.e. crystallized crack is punished more harshly that powdered crack, but both have the same potency - guess which type of crack minorities have more access to), but overall it's been accepted that you give up your freedom if you break the laws of your society.
Prisoners have no right to privacy, they have no right to free assembly, they have no right to carry arms (this part at least makes sense, right?), and a bunch of other rights that we enjoy as citizens. Now, seeing as how they have no 4th amendment rights, why can't we shackle RFID tags on them? It's not cruel or painful, and it prevents prison riots/prison escapes by letting the guards know where they are. Denying prisoners fundamental rights is part of their punishment and ostracization.
Seeing as how strip searches/metal detectors are already standard practice in jails and have been for decades, I see this as perhaps one of the only USEFUL and legit applications of RFID tags.
Crying foul over non-existent rights violations makes it all the harder for people to take you seriously when actual violations occur (i.e. Guantanomo Bay, secret evidence b/c of national security, etc...).
Btw, the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. Look it up on Google sometime.
And then link every two inmates together, so that if they ever get separated, both get fried!
That might make a good movie.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
Well yeah, no kidding. The entire justice system is based on that. You're responding to his argument by bringing up an ENTIRELY seperate argument.
If we totally want to avoid guilty convictions, I guess we should abolish prisons then.
Tags without batteries are powered by a transmitter in the reader, which in turn activates a transmitter in the tag. (In one common system the tag doesn't technically "transmit" but modulates an antenna which absorbs the reader energy; this makes little difference in the operation.
Tags with batteries can be read tens of meters away. Passive tags can be read tens of meters away if they are activated by a sufficiently powerful or otherwise close read signal. Tags which do not have to be read at high speed (e.g. vehicles) can be read at much greater distances everything else being equal.
With existing technology, it would be quite feasible to give everyone an implant and read their tags with great reliability as they walk past, for example, every street corner in a large city.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Makes my 3 days in Dewey County South Dakota small tatters ;)
I've seen several posts in this topic that make comments like "why do we need this to know where the inmates are...we already know that easily".
The reason I'm posting this reply as an AC, something I normally never do, is because I've been on the other side. I'm an ex-con. And no, I'm not kidding. I did slightly over two years in prison, and then 8 years on parole, for credit card fraud. Now you know where my experience on this subject comes from.
In anything less than a maximum security prison, you'd be amazed at how easy it is to get somewhere undetected and do something bad (usually violent) to another inmate. And it can happen in front of 50 other inmates, and I'll bet you money that no one saw a thing.
Anything that could narrow the location of a particular inmate down to a room or a particular area, quickly, automatically and with a high degree of accuracy, would be a massive improvement over current systems. And it wouldn't necessarily save the lives of just inmates. Guards are around the inmates every day.
However, I do agree with a point a couple of others have already made. If these chips are in an arm-band or something of that nature, some smart guy with a lot of time on his hands (and everyone in a prison has lots of time to think) is going to figure out how to get the arm-band off. If they're going to do it, they need to do it right. Implant the chip under the skin upon the start of the prison sentence, and remove it upon the day of release.
You can sign me "been there, done that, got the black and white stripped t-shirt too".