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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.'"
But the bad news is that it has no basic impact on crime, on re-offending, with many criminals comitting crimes while tagged.
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.
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.
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.
... 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"?)
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Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
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.
Otherwise one could come across a Canadian without ever realizing it. Many look and sound like normal people.
Are you sure you've really met someone from Canada before?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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
> 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.
Not just Denmark.
GP is just exaggerating, probably to reinforce his personal world-view.
Hit up google for recidivism and rehabilitation and you'll find papers like this one that show non-punitive rehabilitation programs can achieve a 25% reduction in recidivism.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
This is the key point. A mom locked up because she sold her excess painkillers to someone to make ends meet ends up in state prison if there are two prior offenses from when she was a delinquent teenager. Someone who isn't really a threat to anyone ends up costing the state a fortune. That's who you target.
Stop assuming this is to do with child rapists and serial killers, or doing away with the prison system as a whole.
The issue people are struggling with in policymaking is that its impossible for a candidate to say (s)he's going to reduce mandatory sentencing because that makes them "soft on crime" and therefore unelectable. So everyone's playing a game where the mandatory sentencing rules merely get strengthened from term to term. Next you have ten-year mandatory sentences for irrelevant offenses under 3-strikes rules, or ridiculous situations in minor embezzlement cases where the FBI gets to charge each separate e-mail as a separate case of wire fraud and puts away someone who stole 5000 bucks from an insurance company for 700 years. The judge has no latitude as the sentence is mandated by law, and the prisons are overcrowded with people who enter as idiots who made a mistake, and exit with a better network of criminals than the team that pulled off the Italian Job. Assuming they exit at all, and we don't pay for some foppish pen-pusher to spend his life living at the expense of the taxpayer.
This alternative isn't about shutting down the prison system, it's about finding a way around idiot politicians who would have you put in jail because you looked at a banknote in the wrong way because that makes them look "tough on crime". Sentencing is only going to increase, so we have to find a way that means sentencing no longer automatically equals prison or certain states will go bankrupt, starting with California some time next month. Again.
Alternatively, all you people voting for "tough on crime" politicians might want to take a closer look at the effect of the "tough on crime" policies that follow and vote differently. But that's never going to happen, so this is the next best solution.
Salocin.com
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.
I was wondering where to insert this article. But it may help with the problem you mention.
Restorative Justice
Also google "Restorative Justice"
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.
the fact that the US is over 6 times larger and have over 6 times the population of any given European country would *Obviously* have *nothing* to do with that.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
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.
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
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....
Remember, "criminal" is a flexible label easily attached to anyone... even you.