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California Tracks Parolees With GPS, Then Ignores Alerts
An anonymous reader writes "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 acting on those alerts, making the devices both a lesson in the pitfalls of technology management and a massive exercise in largely useless spending."
California prisons are overfull and underfunded, they are operating at somewhere near twice capacity. They don't have enough guards and on a lot of the prisons the guard towers around the perimeter are empty: you could just drive a truck through the fence, pick someone up and leave before anyone realized what was happening. If you are a non-violent criminal, you will probably only need to serve half or even a quarter of your sentence before being released. In addition, the prison systems are an inefficient bureaucracy. They send prisoners to different places to get check-ups that could be easily done in one place, things like that. All this information I got from my uncle who is a prison administrator, so take it for what it's worth.
If you are wondering why the prisons in California are so full, it's because a few years ago we passed a "three strikes you're out" law, which means repeat offenders get life imprisonment. So they are trying creative stuff like this. Guess it's not working.
Qxe4
A larger source of the problem was starting in the 80s (Reagan) and again in the 90s (Clinton) import tariffs were dropped to almost nothing in the US with the expectation that we'd make it all back in IP jobs and money: entertainment, software and biotech.
We learned that many countries were quite happy to sell to the US with the reduced tariffs in place, but didn't drop their own, and didn't necessarily give diddly-squat about our IP and its rules.
Tariffs are quite high on sugar and textiles, but for electronics and heavy industry, it's almost non-existent.
A union allows workers to bargain with employers collectively. Corporations act collectively (RIAA, MPAA, other industry associations), why shouldn't workers?
The reason Chinese workers are cheaper than American workers is because the cost of living is cheaper there. When I was in Thailand in the USAF in 1974 you could take a bus anywhere in the country for a nickle, buy a tailored silk shirt for $10, feed four people in a restaraunt for a dollar. I paid thirty dollars a month to rent my bungalow (when I got back, for comparison, I paid $160 a month for a shotgun house in the slums and a McDonalds "meal" cost two bucks for one person). Now tell me how you can possibly compete with that?
And here's a little tip: most union workers don't earn $150k/yr. I have a friend who's worked for the postal service for thirty years fixing those big mail boxes, he makes $75k. Were it not for his union he'd probably be making little more than minimum wage.
Unless you're a corporatist or business owner, you're dead wrong about unions. Any working person who is anti-union is stupid, ignorant, or crazy.
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