Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
But the bad news is that it has no basic impact on crime, on re-offending, with many criminals comitting crimes while tagged.
In order for this to work properly, the surveillance must keep an eye on the prisoners. But humans are group animals - prisoners outside a prison will have contact with innocent citizens. So, logically, surveillance will be forced to keep an eye on everybody.
Checking whether they show up at work at the right time, and leave at the right time can be automated.
But how to check what a "prisoner" does in its free time? How to make sure they don't engage in other illegal activities? You must keep an eye on the surroundings, and all the people who are in contact with the convict.
I conclude that this plan has the potential to be the biggest privacy failure in history.
The prisoners win, the system wins, but the innocent bystanders who never do something wrong will have to fear that the nation-wide surveillance will be massively extended. (But hey, they got nothing to hide, right?)
But everybody will break the law at some point... and with such a huge surveillance, soon the government will own everybody. Ok, ok, I might exaggerate a bit... but this is no development to applaud for.
Having done 5 years federal time myself, I know something about this. I was busted in 1992, did 5 years, got out and havn't been in trouble since, except for too many speeding tickets. I think I'm the exception. Most go back. They call it life on the installment plan. The thing is, once you get used to being inside you loose skills needed to function in society, and the problem just becomes worse. I don't know what the number is now, but when I was inside, there were over 1 million people behind bars. That's not "on parole", that's the number behind bars. That's one out of every 300 people in the united states. I don't know what the cost is now, but when I was inside, it cost 30,000 per year to keep someone locked up. I think that for sex offenders and violent people like rapists, killers, and child molesters, the prison is the best solution. If you would only lock up THESE people, instead of non violent drug offenders, you would reduce the prison population tremendously. I bet if you look at the cost of the drug war and the cost of keeping these people locked up, including the lost taxes because they are not productive members of society, the cost would be far more than we've spent on the war in Iraq. There may even be enough money there to turn the economy around :)
Why go to all that effort of targeting criminals? You could do like what the UK has done, install CCTV EVERYWHERE and make the entire country a virtual prison.
Speaking from my experience, it feels nice to get out of the UK on holiday. However, due to the number of cameras and them being everywhere everywhere, the UK really does feel like one large open prison when you return. So much for being a free country.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
> It is a sad fact that the ONLY rehabilitation that works
> on criminals is a bullet through the brain. Not a single
> other system has any noticable effect.
Well, not entirely true. Getting people out of the environments that lead them towards a criminal lifestyle tends to be pretty effective (aside from the seriously mentally ill, of course).
Prison, unfortunately, is the exact opposite of doing that.
A bullet through the brain, on the other hand, gets points for a cheap and effective after-the-fact approach.
Log in or piss off.
You do realize that the death penalty is more expensive and that there's no evidence that it represents any additional deterrent effect over life without possibility of parole? Hell, even in Texas where the death penalty has been handed out liberally over the years, the rates have been dropping because life without possibility of parole is a more than adequate solution. It's tough for any punishment to deter somebody that doesn't believe he's going to be caught, let alone convicted. Worse still is that somebody that kills only one or two people is far more likely to get it than somebody that kills a dozen. The whole point of the death penalty in recent years has been as a tool to plea bargain people into a life sentence.
The U.S. is rapidly becoming a two-tier society in terms of civil rights because of our desire to lock everyone up and the reality of being unable to do so (most of this is driven by the war and drugs and the secondary lawlessness caused by drugs).
First-tier citizens are those who have never been convicted of a felony.
Second-tier citizens are those who have been convicted of a felony and are either on long-term probation or parole or have served a long sentence. In most cases, these people lose most of their civil rights and cannot reclaim them without a difficult appeal process or a pardon.
I don't have a problem with convicted felons, serving their sentence in a prison or on parole losing their civil rights. Depending on the crime, some long-term probationary convicts, such as violent criminals, should probably have some of their rights curtailed (eg, buying a weapon) for the duration of their probationary period.
The problem is, though, that we're convicting these people on 10+ year sentences, often for violent crimes, and then after 18 months, we're letting them out on probation or parole and treating them like second class citizens forever. And then we wonder why unemployment is so high and why people don't feel part of the society as a whole.