GPS tracking of sex offenders November 11, 2006
Posted by Rich in : GPS tracking and public safety , trackbackEarlier this week, California voters passed Proposition 83, requiring GPS monitoring of sex offenders. The ballot measure had its flaws (such as forcing sex offenders to live in rural areas), and only a day after the election, that non-GPS component was blocked in court.
GPS tracking of convicted criminals is gaining popularity rapidly, but does it really work? Wired News recently explored GPS tracking of sex offenders:
But there’s a hitch: The ankle bracelets — usually accompanied by digital-pager-size transmitters — are hardly criminal-proof. Convicts can easily cut the bracelets off and run away as their probation officer gets an alarm and tries to contact the local police. For health reasons, the bracelets aren’t designed to be permanent.
“GPS will not prevent a crime,” said Steve Chapin, CEO of Pro Tech Monitoring, a manufacturer of GPS tracking devices. “It’s a crime deterrent. It has proven to be a good tool, but you can’t oversell it — there’s no physical barrier that it creates that can prevent a crime.”
Here’s a little bit more of the story:
Donald Smith, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, said it’s wrong to rely on technology instead of teaching children to be cautious. “People would like alarms to go off when pedophiles go near their children,” he said. “The real problem is that the pedophile is likely to be their brother, their uncle, their cousin.”
On the other hand, a new study of more than 75,000 Florida convicts found that both GPS monitoring and old-fashioned, house-arrest electronic monitoring (the kind Martha Stewart endured) made convicts more likely to toe the line.
“Our conclusion is that it does help protect public safety, that these offenders are less likely to get in trouble,” said study co-author Kathy Padgett of Florida State University.
GPS technology is “pretty reliable,” but conventional devices often don’t allow tracking inside buildings, said Richard Langley, a professor who studies GPS tracking at the University of New Brunswick in Canada.
Conceivably, sex offenders could head to an indoor shopping mall and get into trouble without anyone knowing exactly where they are. But cell phones may help triangulate people’s positions inside buildings, even to specific floors, and Pro Tech’s Chapin predicted that his company’s GPS devices will eventually allow tracking in buildings. For now, though, his goal is to make a “smaller, cheaper, lighter product.”
Technorati tags: GPS tracking of criminals, GPS tracking of sex offenders
Comments»
[...] GPS tracking of sex offenders [...]
[...] is currently trying to determine whether the state or counties are responsible for the required lifetime GPS tracking of sex offenders, once they complete parole. In the meanwhile, GPS tracking is being discontinued once an offender [...]
I think that eventually we are going to head into concentration camps and our babies once born are going to be placed with gps tracking chips and yes monitoring of sex offenders is a good idea but at what cost does it deter them from commiting a crime? will the victim of that crime be unhurt? NO because after the fact is when the offender gets caught and what about those offenders who do what they are supposed to and have been compliant I mean they have polygraphs and registration and now GPS tracking!! not just that some of these offenders are homeless and if the battery goes dead what happens a violation and back to jail for more tax dollars at work this is rediculous and should be put back into the test phase and just train our law enforcement to do thier jobs better and locate these predators more often than every 90 days prior to GPS
Concerned,
I understand people’s frustrations, but nobody’s hauling you to a concentration camp. Anytime any new technology comes around people start screaming about “big brother” or “work camps” and everything else. Education is the key with this new technology, it was never designed to actually stop crimes from taking place, it was designed as a tool to use in conjunction with programs already in place to tackle recidivism rates. If someone’s hell bent on hurting someone no piece of technology is going to stop them, but it will be helpful as an early warning system and the data collected can be used in a court of law. It’s better than a simple piece of paper or monthly check-ins, but it’s not the end all to be all.