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.'"

Comments

Already used in the UK

[Chrisq]

But the bad news is that it has no basic impact on crime, on re-offending, with many criminals comitting crimes while tagged.

Re:Already used in the UK

[value_added]

Apparently, neither does incarceration. ;-)

In the US, particularly here in California, the prison industry and unions have a disproportionate influence on the workings of the criminal justice system.

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.

Re:Already used in the UK

[shentino]

Only as long as convicts aren't forced to sign a waiver stating they won't sue if the device malfunctions and zaps them by accident.

Re:Already used in the UK

[mikael_j]

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...

Re:Already used in the UK

[Jaysyn]

Let the liberal, hippies castrate this until it won't "scar" the delicate souls of the inmates, limiting it to such a stupidity and rendering it completely incompetent -

Actually, you are much more likely to run into opposition from the prison-industrial complex, & they ain't liberal, but let's not let facts or common sense get in the way of a good rant.

Re:Already used in the UK

[dave420]

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.

Re:Already used in the UK

[Paradise Pete]

Let the liberal, hippies castrate this

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.)

Re:Already used in the UK

[bazorg]

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.

Re:Already used in the UK

[FourthAge]

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?

Re:Already used in the UK

[HungryHobo]

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.

Re:Already used in the UK

[dangitman]

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.

Re:Already used in the UK

[boxwood]

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?

Re:Already used in the UK

[insufflate10mg]

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.

Re:Already used in the UK

[DJRumpy]

Arguably, given the article you posted, it doesn't appear to be effective in the way it was presented, but I found a few points interesting.

This person gives no references for the statement claiming 'it doesn't work', nor does he compare it to the current incarceration method statistics and he doesn't present any statistics from typical prison based incarceration. He of course only speaks to and ask about the worst case scenarios (those that managed to get out of their collars, those that these private companies failed to monitor, or those that didn't get them in the first place), which of course gives him worse statistics than expected.

Last point that I noticed, the article said the companies could not supply him with any studies indicating that tagging was effective. The point being that they simply don't know if it's effective as no studies have been done to date, or they aren't aware of any. You interpreted that as "it doesn't work".

But the bad news is that it has no basic impact on crime, on re-offending [bbc.co.uk], with many criminals comitting crimes while tagged.

Re:Already used in the UK

[bazorg]

my objection is more about replacing simple solutions with complicated solutions that are harder to keep under control.

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.

Re:Already used in the UK

[IndustrialComplex]

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?

Why stop at "prison"?

[mbstone]

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.

Re:Why stop at "prison"?

[RadioElectric]

I was surprised to see that this wasn't even mentioned in the article. The problem with this system is that it blurs the line between criminals and "free" citizens. Once this becomes cheaper, and the technology is less obtrusive, will there be any reason to not make the devices permanent? Once it is shown to be effective for preventing people reoffending for serious crimes, what will stop them rolling it out to people who commit even minor crimes (the article even mentions using it being used for truancy).

Although this sounds like it will help with a few of the issues that are faced with managing the criminal population, I don't see any way of preventing it's eventual use to control society as a whole. Though if history has taught us anything it's that the eventual measures of control which are used will be more insidious than we could imagine from looking at this technology now.

Why not just embed everyone with GPS at birth

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Or we could save 25% off the bat

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat

[nlvp]

No they're not, the poster and the article talk about total drug deaths, there is no underlying assumption of equality in the size of the populations.

The article referenced is also focused on the trend : a rapidly increasing number of deaths from prescription drug overdoses, which presages a significant problem in the years to come.

To use your example, and using the numbers in Jah-Wren's post, its as if 8700 people died from car crashes and 10-13K people jumped off the tower wearing a pink hat, and the 10-13K is increasing rapidly year-on-year. That's a pink-hat-and-tower problem, regardless of how you slice your statistics.

Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat

[RatherBeAnonymous]

Which is exactly what happened when prohibition ended. The gangs that made fortunes smuggling and selling booze branched out into other forms of organized crime. But, over the past 60 years or so, the mafia's power has waned. I predict that if drugs are legalized, the street gangs that currently fund their operations by selling drugs will branch into more violent crime, and the turf wars will intensify as they fight over their piece of a smaller and smaller pie. But over time, fewer and fewer kids will see the gang life as the path to money and power that it is now.

A cell with one cellmate is...

[Rene S. Hollan]

... often far safer than "open time" in the quad, and yes, I write from experience.

Re:I don't think it'll work

[dave420]

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.

Yeah, let's not blame bad laws where it starts

[erroneus]

"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.

Re:Well...

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Only killing works

[c]

> 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.

Re:Experiences in Denmark say otherwise ...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit

[dcollins]

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.

Re:Only killing works

[aaandre]

Remember, "criminal" is a flexible label easily attached to anyone... even you.