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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.
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
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.
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
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.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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?
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Remember, "criminal" is a flexible label easily attached to anyone... even you.