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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.'"
In the future, everyone will have to carry a GPS, not just "prisoners," and you won't be allowed in Beverly Hills without an appointment.
That way if they do something wrong it will be easier to prove and the "incarceration" can be switched on remotely. Add an integrated taser and you've got the ultimate means of population control.
Maybe the problem is the laws are fucked up??? Maybe their incarcerating for things that should be a summary offense? Maybe there are too many laws?
The people in 1984 had it easy.
Roughly 25% of people in prison are there for non-violent drug offenses.
We could implement this GPS plan and fund a nice chunk of corporate socialism for the industry around it.
Or we could get the stick out of our ass, end the war on drugs and start making our deeds better match our words about being the most free country on the planet and in the process shave 25% of the taxpayers' prison bill - maybe even more considering how much violent crime is derivative of the drug trade.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Sounds like a great story for an SF movie, too bad it was done before, back in 1987:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/
Might have something to do with the facts that:
1. Criminals aren't tagged at the time of release, but sometime later.
2. The tags are handled by private companies, not the government.
It's like there was a competition, "How badly can we screw this up?", and everyone tried their hardest.
... often far safer than "open time" in the quad, and yes, I write from experience.
In Liberty, Rene
Everyone breaks some laws in modern life. It can be as simple as speeding to not filling a form out correctly.
This makes "jail" cheap enough for everyone. Also I suspect over time it would evolve into something like what released sex offenders have to deal with. At least prisoners get food and medical care.
Just put a collar on some one, tell them they are not allowed to go anywhere over 5 miles away. And not to a list of prohibited places and let them go... Who will hire them?
How will they eat. What about places where GPS does not work...
Soon everyone who does not have money for a lawyer would have a tracker attached.
Violent offenders would still be locked up.
(Obviously, I thought... why do geeks have to be so "all or nothing"?)
No sig today...
Somehow I seriously doubt it would be "less than 1 in a 1000000" that got "zapped" wrongfully. Underpaid, bitter and plain nasty remote operators would most likely love the excuse to "zap" a convict. Add to this that there will most likely be some sort of manual "zap" capability as well and you're more likely to see random convicts getting "zapped" simply as a way to amuse the operators...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
TFA claims that prisons have failed. I don't entirely agree. The way I see it, prisons have three roles: one is reeducation, when we release someone from prison, they should come out as better citizens, not better criminals. In that respect, you could say that prisons have failed.
The second role of prisons however is punishment: prison SHOULD be an unpleasant experience for someone who has committed a crime. It should be a deterrent, something they will never want to experience again. Also, if you're a victim of a crime, you want to know that the criminal actually gets punished and doesn't get off with just a slap on the wrist.
Finally, the third role of prisons is protecting society, taking dangerous individuals out of the loop for a considerable amount of time so that they can't do any harm.
It seems to me that while GPS tracking devices may help somewhat with role 1, they don't do anything for role 2 and 3. So in my opinion, they shouldn't be a replacement for a prison system, but an addition to it, for instance in combination with the parole system.
Here's a notion. Why not try to figure out what is wrong with your society that causes so much crime and then deal with it. Then you won't have to put so many people in prison. The U.S. is the land of the free, yet it has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Surely someone must be asking, "Hey, why is that?"
Bibo Ergo Sum.
You're so sure technology cannot be polished and that everything's going to fail, then why risk driving a car?
I didn't say the tech would fail. Also, I don't drive.
why risk going on a bus? the under paid bitter driver might smash into a wall for fun.
Well, considering that most humans have some basic sense of self-preservation and the newspapers aren't exactly filled with reports of crazed bus drivers driving into walls for shits and giggles, I think I'll be fine.
Or why eat out? the underpaid bitter waiter might poo in your food for entertainment.
I rarely eat at restaurants. However, I do occasionally order pizza but I am friendly with the guys who run the local pizza place and I doubt it would be in their best interest to defecate on the food since they want repeat customers. It is also in their best interests not to do anything that would get the health inspectors to shut them down.
Why aren't police officers shooting people for fun?
Actually, it seems that powertripping police officers beating up, tazing and macing people for no good reason isn't all that uncommon. We recently had an incident around here where a group of police officers decided that a drunk man in his 20s was best dealt with by beating him severely, handcuffing him and finally leaving him to die on the floor of their van...
How about requiring an authorization password from the operator - which immediately logs the operator name, time and the location of the prisoner - to guarantee accountability? no. liberal hippies are no better than small minded bigots.
If you can't see how the system can still possibly be abused often enough that your claim of only 0.0001% wrongful "zappings" seems naive then you should probably consider the possibility that you are either biased or a troll.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The way I see it, the only way a GPS-based system would be implemented as anything but a pilot program would if there were huge amounts of money to be made. If saving money was the issue, we could reduce crime, costs, and prison populations starting tomorrow simply by writing each offenders a monthly check for a portion of their incarceration cost. Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
Heck, you could go a few steps further and implement proper educational and social welfare programs. Kinda hard to do that and pretend to be "tough on crime" at the same time though.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Stop crying "liberal!" it's making you look seriously retarded. When you were young, did your dad bang on about how communists are trying to take down the US? It's pathetic.
Anyway, the people you are decrying are people who simply spotted a serious and counter-productive way this new suggestion could be misused, and pointed that out. So I guess in your mind "liberal" == "someone who's paying attention".
It must suck to be you. Seriously.
It takes testicular fortitude to not chicken out and kill murderers. It's far too easy to stoop to their level. Not doing so requires dedication and self-control.
Your arguments would be more persuasive if they didn't immediately resort to inane labeling of anyone who might take issue with them. It's the rhetorical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "I can't hear you because you're a liberal hippie!" Labeling the opposition is a cheap and lazy way to avoid addressing what they have to say.
(For what it's worth, I am not a hippie and most decidedly not a liberal.)
You sound very confident, do you have a source for that "near-100%" statistic?
I'm asking because in my opinion this "sex offenders / serious violent offenders always do it again" myth has been debunked quite thoroughly. Rape and homicide especially are not repeated very often -- recidivism percentages are in the 1-10% bracket for the typical 3-5 year data period. Harris&Hanson calculated that in 15 years 3 out of 4 sex offenders have not been rearrested -- this is a very good figure compared to just about any other form of crime. See "Predicting Relapse" by Hanson and Bussiere (collects data from 61 international studies), or the half a dozen DoJ studies on recidivism for starters. There are some sub-types of sexual offences that seem to be more prone to repeating (and I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for homicide) but that wasn't your point, was it?
Another widely popular myth is visible in your "Homie da Gangsta gang-rape" idea. Most sexual assaults (80-90%) are committed by someone known to the victim (you can find this in DoJ statistics as well, can't remember the exact ref).
imagine something that would deal an extremely painful, incapacitating electric shock whenever one steps out of his allowed boundary.
I can imagine that abducting people with such devices would become a popular sport.
"War on Drugs" anyone? They eventually backed down from prohibition of alcohol, so why not other substances? There is a lot of stuff that should be legal and no point in going into a discussion about it. We have even more laws that need repealing as well such as those associated with prostitution and other activities. These aren't "nice" things to do and I probably wouldn't engage in any of them, but I don't think they should be illegal either. People are going to trash their lives no matter what laws are written. The impact on society that turning them into felons has is fewer voters and a lot more bus boys and career criminals. (No one will hire a felon for a good job. Not ever.)
Fix the laws, there will be fewer criminals.
As a not-liberal not-hippie I think I would prefer prison.
Not only could your devices go wrong by triggering early, they could also go wrong by not triggering at all, or by being temporarily removed (which happens a lot in the UK). I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
All of which have been ironically enabled by misguided "prison reforms", and are apparently now considered an inevitable consequence of prison, which apparently also "inevitably" makes people worse. I cannot understand why it is now considered impossible to keep order within a fucking prison. A hundred years ago our ancestors had no trouble keeping absolute control of prisoners.
It's like the basic idea of prison has been forgotten. We put the bad guys in prison so that the rest of us don't have to live in a prison. We subject the criminals to authoritarianism so that the rest of us can live in freedom. Why is this hard to understand?
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
What about using prison labour to provide cheap goods and services?
This is already done, but it's a terrible idea. Prisoners, who are working very cheaply, compete with free people who are working for a reasonable wage, distorting market prices. Maintaining the supply of cheap goods requires maintaining the supply of prisoners, giving the state an incentive to create more laws that poor people will routinely break so that they can be put to work at below the market rate.
You already have this system in the USA. You also have the highest proportion of your population incarcerated of any country.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Do you by any chance edit for conservapedia?
Cause that's the only place I've ever seen anyone else throw around the term "liberal" in such a wierd manner or blame everything bad with the world on liberals.
Someone called you out on a absurd figure of 1 in 100000.
five 9's reliability for a system that is expected to opperate outside a controlled environment is wishful thinking at best and self delusion at worst.
Have you even thought about how such a system might opperate?
if this thing is based on GPS or radio then you have the problem that you have to deal with the signals actually getting to the device.
there are 2 situations you have to deal with.
1: Someone who while wearing one of these devices wraps it in tinfoil and goes to mexico.
2: Someone who while wearing one of these devices walks down into his basement or as part of a job (gainful employment is good isn't it) has to carry stuff into a metal shipping container or for any reason at all legitimately ends up either underground or inside a metal cage.
In both cases you completely loose all signals too and from the device.
So what should the device do in such a situation?
Do you have it administer a crippling shock to them when the device loses signal?
Well you've going to have a hell of a lot of nasty car accidents in tunnels.
The more time you give them the more time they have to get over a border or to get somewhere where the device can be safely removed.
If widely used you can be sure a black market would spring up for removing these things.
Want to go across town and kill/rob/rape someone? find some legit reason to be inside a metal cage or anywhere else where elecromagnetic signals are blocked, wrap it in tinfoil and be sure to remove the tinfoil at the spot you were in when you put it on.
And if it's GPS based it'll lose track of you anywhere inside.
If it's based on positioning with cell phone towers then anywhere with no cellphone signal is good.
And you dismiss offhand the idea that the system opperators will go sadistic yet that's a real posibility.
the stanford prison experiment was a lovely illistration that power really does corrupt, put normal nice people in a position of power over others and many of them will, in a short time, become sadistic and cruel.
If prisoners getting shocked happens a lot then pretty soon people stop paying attention to the logs and after that people would start doing it for shits and giggles.
I'm all for technology but I can spot a poor idea when I see it.
this tech would probably be fine for really low level offenders, kids who shoplift, petty criminals or white collar criminals you simply want to track reasonably but if that's your goal then quietly making a deal with the cellphone companies to get the positions of their phones would be almost as effective (especially if they don't know you're doing it and as such they don't know to leave their phones at home).
For any significantly dangerous person this system is useless no matter how big a capacitor you stick in it.
Drugs such as opium and heroin WERE legal but they caused so much misery and strife that they were banned in almost all nations. People who thing legalising drugs will somehow make addicts and the problems they cause vanish are living in a dream world. Perhaps you might like to check out the number of deaths either through violence , drunk driving or liver disease from alcohol - that well known legal drug.
Also, you're weird. It sounds to me like you have an issue with authority in general, as you immediately suspect that operators would gladly abuse their power to zap convicted felons.
Many, many psychological experiments have shown this to be the case. In fact, some of them are among the most famous psychology experiments that have ever been conducted. Perhaps you should look them up?
The "zapping" is particularly relevant here, as we have seen how Tasers have been massively abused by police forces. Non-lethal weapons in general appear to encourage abuse.
Nobody agrees that people should be beaten by the cops for no reason.
Yet it happens every day, every hour, every minute.
The police kill innocent people much less often than criminals kill innocent people.
Now, that's a completely different thing. When a cop kills somebody it usually comes with a pretty serious investigation. That's why non-lethal weapons are so popular among sadists. It enables them to get their kicks without being punished themselves. It's too easy for police to claim that they had to restrain or Taser somebody. It's a lot harder to claim that you needed to kill them.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Liberal hippies?
I'm more worried about this from a libertarian perspective. Once the cost of "imprisoning" someone is low enough, then its a lot easier to increase sentences and criminalize a lot more stuff.
"It seems you're missing a tail light... the penalty for that is being tagged for 20 years."
Even as expensive as prisons are now, the US has almost 2.5 million people imprisoned. Make it cheap and how long will it be before anyone busted for possession of weed in their early 20's has to to be tagged until they're well into their 40s?
It wouldn't take too long before you'd have a sizable underclass which would have no rights, but still be able to do various manual labour jobs. It wouldn't very much different than slavery.
Yes prisons are expensive, but in a way thats a good thing. That means there is a cost to making all sorts of stupid laws that everyone is in violation of sometime in their lives. Or have you never smoked a joint, pirated a song, attended an anti-government demonstration, or drove over the speed limit?
If someone goes to prison and stays there, the objective of stopping them from committing more offences is met for the duration of the imprisonment. The objective of punishing the person is also met. The objective of getting them back to a useful role in society is up to the offender.
If someone gets a portable GPS+torture bracelet as punishment, I don't see how the rest of the community is spared from the risk of immediate reprisals or further offences.
On top of that, it actually opens the door to vigilante-type initiatives. The neighbourhood watch (or the opposing gang) finds that someone is carrying the bracelet, take him on a van and just watch as he gets zapped by remote control. Not fun.
shave 25% of the taxpayers' prison bill - maybe even more considering how much violent crime is derivative of the drug trade
What's in that for government?
Drug prohibition is a billion-dollar business. There is simply no way the elite at the top of the pyramid are going to give that up, especially considering how prohibition is a self-sustaining source of endless revenue. The more violence on the street (a direct result of prohibition), the more money needed to "fix" the problem, the greater the level of prohibition, and (surprise) the more violence on the street. It's a perfect self-sustaining money-making machine, and when you're in a position to control that flow of cash, you are in a position to exploit it for personal gain.
Did I just imply that morality, safety, and indecency are merely the smokescreens of drug prohibition, and the real goal is merely cold hard cash? You're damn right I did.
Why not put new police officers through those tests? Because the police (of every country, even) is proof that a significant amount of those people do get hired in positions of power.
The USA has 0.75% of it's population in prison (and growing)
These people are often used as cheap labour in prisons
Prisons are generally considered unmanageable, contraband of all types is freely available and discipline is poor at best
When was slavery abolished in the US ?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
It sounds to me like you have an issue with authority in general, as you immediately suspect that operators would gladly abuse their power
Actually, it's pretty much guaranteed. If there is ever a proposal to increase the authority one human has over another, the first question should be:
How will/can this authority be abused?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
If someone goes to prison and stays there, the objective of stopping them from committing more offences is met for the duration of the imprisonment. The objective of punishing the person is also met. The objective of getting them back to a useful role in society is up to the offender.
I agree with most of what you said, but the part quoted above throws me for a loop. For anyone sent to jail for a period that is less than half of their remaining life expectancy (as a somewhat arbitrary place to draw the line), that third objective seems to be the most valuable for society. Let's say a healthy 35-year-old is imprisoned for 5 years for some non-violent crime, for example. If I had to pick only one of those objectives to be fulfilled (with no other concerns like cost, possibility of failure, etc), then I would pick the 3rd; whether they are physically prevented from committing another offense for the next 5 years is less important to the health of society than whether they are likely to commit another offense during the next 10 years. Do you see how the latter of those considerations has the same motivation as the first (i.e. overall reduction of crime)?
Based on your "harder to keep under control" statement, I get the impression you might prefer the current system partly because it is reliable -- in most cases, imprisoning someone for 5 years will pretty reliably prevent them from committing offenses during that 5 years (or at least offenses that directly affect the rest of society), whereas trying to consider whether someone is likely to commit crimes in the future involves statistics and guesswork. However, that's what cost-benefit analysis is for.
You also seem to dismiss society's role in that thrid objective as a matter of principle (when I read your comment, I heard an implied "It should be the offender's responsibility, therefore I refuse to consider whether this new option is more or less likely to produce repeat offenders than the current system."). In contrast, I suggest taking a practical outlook. I don't care who should be responsible for whether they commit another offense after their prison term is up, I care about what will be best for society (all costs and benefits considered, as well as we practically can).
To be clear, I'm not saying I think this proposed system is better -- I haven't stated my opinion one way or another on that. I have simply objected to your dismissal of considering whether a given system is more or less likely to produce repeat offenders versus upstanding citizens.
Unfortunately, that isn't how this has worked out historically. Non-violent offenders are not generally housed today with violent offenders anyway, so this would have no effect. What is highly likely is that problem prisoners that are difficult to manage within a prison environment get pushed out the door with monitoring so they are no longer a problem.
The immediate effect is that we are once again pushing mentally disturbed folks out on the street. In the 1970s we closed the hospitals and pushed the people that were confined there out. They were supposed to go to halfway houses and residential treatment centers. But in large measure they walked away from those and became the first wave of homeless. A lot of them ended up in prison, where today they get little or no treatment and are very difficult to manage in a prison environment.
This would be an absolutely wonderful outcome for all of those prison wardens who wake up every day wondering what they are going to do. They do not have the staff to control these people and they don't have the tools to do it either. So of course you have all sorts of unmanageable behavior - everything from inmates peeing in the hallway to attacking each other. Yes, wonderful idea to push them back out onto the streets with some tracking so they can easily be found. Home? Well, that might be a problem as these folks don't have homes. Or a family that can manage them.
The mistake was dumping these people out of the hospitals where they had the staff and tools to manage these people. It was viewed as cruel and inhumane to keep them locked up. A bunch of made-for-TV movies exploited the concept of nice people locked away for no reason at all. There was this small side effect - the state hospitals cost a fortune to run and by closing them the states saved all this money. Of course it was an attractive idea to release these people and probably as many as 50% of them did OK.
We are still reeling from the impact of the other 50%. And it continues on today.
Let's say you have a brother that is "developmentally challenged" and has violent temper tantrums. A six year-old in a man's body with all of the self-control and judgement of a six year-old. You might try caring for him in your house but after a few violent incidents it quickly becomes either a lifelong committment without including the rest of the family or pushing the brother into a home of some sort. Unfortunately, unless you are willing to foot the bill (which is pretty darn high) almost nobody will take someone like that. There are no more treatment facilities. There are no more hospitals or "sanitariums". What exactly do you do?
For far too many of these types of people there is the "Fourth and Main" approach which is only slightly different than letting the undesired and unwanted dog out on at the rest stop and driving away. It quickly becomes someone else's problem and the only folks around with any ability to do anything are the police. Trust me, they don't want it. But all it takes is one violent outburst in public and the police have little choice in the matter. As does the judge. So it becomes a Department of Corrections problem. And this is where a good part of the problem in prisons can be pointed at.
So of course they want to push the problem somewhere else - back on the street. Just like in the 1970s.
I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
How about a compromise? A touchy-feely hippie ultra-authoritarian regime that prevents rape, gang fights, and drug dealing while providing education and therapy.
There's a big overlap between bad guys, people with emotional/psychological problems, and people who have horrible lives with no opportunities for betterment. While we're locking up the bad guys, we might want to try to make them less bad.
Also, let's lock up fewer guys. Legalize drugs, do away with mandatory sentencing. Save prison time for violent offenders.
Exactly. I rather dislike seeing IMDB links for this reason. Why not link to the Wikipedia page for the film, or even simply say "the Running man", and hyperlink that to IMDB? It's much more courteous to the reader. Wikipedia links have the benefit of being nearly as easy to search for as IMDB movie links yet still being human-readable.
The fundamental problem is not the how-prisons-work part. The real problem is the putting-people-in-the-system part.
Reducing the cost of removing people's freedom will not solve the problem, it will incentivize it and increase it. Just like (a) computers didn't create paperless offices, and (b) increased efficiency didn't lead to reduced work hours, and (c) tasers didn't lead to a reduction police abuse, and (d) helmets don't reduce motorcycle accident rates, and (e) unmanned killer drones don't reduce the length of our wars.
Instead, I propose: re-writing drug laws and incarcerating a fraction of the people we do now.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
Why not? There are so many laws on file now that we're all criminals to some extent without knowing it. The majority of people in prison are the ones who got caught and couldn't afford a lawyer.
The sad fact about prison is that the people who really deserve to be there (the socio-paths etc) tend to influence the non-socio paths into socio-paths so when they get out of prison they already have contacts on the outside to go commit crime.
Also because of the way background checks work, its very hard for a first time offender to ever be re-integrated back into society so they usually either resort to crime or become a ward of the state.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Where it works this may be good in the short run, but I see a couple of potential (and sinister) downsides:
1) It makes punishment much more acceptable. I'm not so worried about the deterrent value, but the fact that you might get put under surveillance for unpaid library fines, downloading the wrong file, etc. This yet another slippery slide into a police state.
2) It makes surveillance much more acceptable, and helps fine tune the technology for it. If it turns out that criminals who do not misbehave live perfectly happy lives under the system, and if it is demonstrated that crime goes down when more people are under such surveillance, the "nanny state" types might be pushing for more people to be tagged like this. The typical "if you're doing nothing wrong, why wouldn't want this?" "think of the children" "terrorism, etc." arguments might be advanced by some and swallowed whole by the increasingly surveillance-desensitized public.
2.5) It may make law enforcement lazy, causing them to push for more of this technology (cheaper, more effective, etc). You can draw an analogy with the convenience of warrant-less wiretapping
I'm not sure what the full answer is, but more surveillance (even if it's just for the criminals -- for now --) gives me a very uneasy feeling....
Heading towards? Heck, man, it was *designed* that way. Check out the 13th amendment:
Doesn't get any more straight-forward and basic than being specified in plain English in the constitution, does it?
Not saying I think it's a good idea (I really don't), but it certainly is the status quo.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Remember, "criminal" is a flexible label easily attached to anyone... even you.