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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.
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
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.
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.
I was wondering where to insert this article. But it may help with the problem you mention.
Restorative Justice
Also google "Restorative Justice"
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.