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Building Prisons Without Walls Using GPS Devices
Hugh Pickens writes "Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic that increasingly GPS devices are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. 'By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace,' writes Wood. But new devices such as ExacuTrack suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might do away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. 'The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers,' adds Wood. 'The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.'"
The quick math shows that's almost 10k per prisoner per year in California. Consider that California seems to be an extreme outlier, I only cited their numbers because of their large prison population, with the Justice Department's most recent (2001 sadly) data showing
A few articles point to the hidden costs of GPS - the significant increase in workload for local police forces being primarily responsible - the lack of actual real-time monitoring, the fact that serious crimes have been committed whilst the offender was being tracked using GPS, and the legal and ethic questions raised.
So have at it oh learned ones.
I think you actually mean http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103239/
The main thing is that prison is the absolute best way western societies have to turn Mr. "Sold a little bit of weed to his friends" into Mr. "Stabbed some dudes in the neck in a bar" or Mr. "Habitual burglar". Prisons have an unwavering ability to turn non-violent offenders into more violent ones, which are then released into society. You asking "where's the punishment" would make sense if prison worked perfectly from society's point of view. It doesn't. The first question that should be asked is how we can make prison into the deterrent it should be, while at the same time ensuring that society doesn't lose a great chunk of its money-making public into violent offenders.
The punishment is that your schedule is controlled 100% by the prison. Yes, you could steal from shops or sell drugs, but as you can be placed at the scene rather easily, and would be sent back to prison for any infraction, I doubt anyone would do it. The same goes for selling drugs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3036450.stm
But maybe something is also wrong with the societies, who 'need' to lock up so many people and have so many reoffenders. Guess if I was at the bottom of a cold-hearted society, where noone cares about me, chances were also higher that I'd become a criminal or reoffender ...
It's been awhile since Sociology, but Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiments come to mind. People in power will often abuse their authority unless they will get caught. Period.
This is a lot more like Rutger Hauer's Wedlock (1991)
They even had the enforcement in place - using explosive charges...
Prison doesn't work that way, here in the US we've got the largest prison population in the world with no evidence that it's actually getting us anything. While it is asinine to suggest that the guys that are currently being held in solitary at the regional super max, for people that are less dangerous a sentence like this could go a long ways. In some parts of the world they actually have what are essentially no security jails, where inmates are on work release and have to come back at the end of the day to the facility to sleep and check in. In the US we've got house arrest for those that meet the condtions.
This has nothing to do with liberalism, unless by liberal you mean well educated and actually capable of considering that stiffer punishments don't necessarily gain better compliance and with some crimes like child sexual abuse it's probably causes the problem more than it solves it. You can't convict somebody if it doesn't get reported, and with some classes of victim they don't want the guilty party to be punished harshly. Hence you get unreported crimes and a crime unprosecuted is not a deterrent.
Also, I take issue with this meme that 25% of all those incarcerated are locked up ONLY for non-violent drug charges. For that to be true, it would require that ON AVERAGE one in for convicts behind bars was guilty of either using or selling drugs, without any associated crimes, like robbery, assault, possession of a gun, etc., and that is simply unbelievable.
There is a lot of evidence for statistics like this, you can start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#United_States_domestic_policy.
Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates in 2007. Of these, 15,647 were incarcerated for violent offenses, including 2,915 for homicide, 8,966 for robbery, and 3,939 for other violent crimes. In addition, 10,345 inmates were serving time for property crimes, including 504 for burglary, 7,834 for fraud, and 2,006 for other property offenses. A total of 95,446 were incarcerated for drug offenses. Also, 56,237 were incarcerated for public-order offenses, including 19,528 for immigration offenses and 24,435 for weapons offenses.
http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p07.pdf
According to a federal survey of jail inmates, of the total 440,670 jail inmates in the US in 2002, 112,447 (25.5%) were drug offenders: 48,823 (11.1%) for possession and 56,574 (12.8%) for trafficking.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/sdatji02.pdf
There are two kinds of sysadmins: paranoids and losers. I'm both kinds.
I was wondering where to insert this article. But it may help with the problem you mention.
Restorative Justice
Also google "Restorative Justice"
No, this is a method of controlling a person in contained environment.
That's called a prison.
Milgram isn't really applicable to this situation. Milgram documents that normal people are willing to perform torture *when ordered to do so by authority figures*, even when doing so causes obvious emotional distress to themselves. The discussion is about whether normal people are willing to perform torture *in violation of the rules*.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
I'm sure that http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/ was a great movie, but I don't feel like clicking on a stupid obfuscated link just to know you are talking about The Running Man.
p.s. The book was a million times better, but there was no GPS tracking. In the book, the game show relied on defaming the hero's character and manipulating the public into turning him in.
When was slavery abolished in the US ?
Never:
13th Amendment.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.