GPS Tracking ROI

And people wonder why the criminal justice system can’t provide justice … this looks like it is a GPS issue … unless you read past the first sentence.

It never ceases to amaze me how important positions like judges and sheriffs can be elective … these are roles for legal scholars and correction and law enforcement specialists … not political hacks.

For years now the people of Massachusetts have been spending time and money determining if a judge’s ego overrules a sheriff’s common sense and authority to run his office as the law directs.

And in the meantime?  What has been accomplished in the important area of crime and punishment?  Not much.

Belmont, Mass. -

When Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Diane Kottmyer discovered the local sheriff had released a dozen prisoners early, placing them instead in an at-home GPS monitoring program, she quickly ordered them thrown back into jail.
The program, she said during an October 2007 hearing, violates judicial authority to determine sentences and to have those sentences carried out.
But on an appeal from Middlesex County Sheriff James DiPaola, the Supreme Judicial Court overruled Kottmyer’s decision 6-1 on Friday, arguing a GPS program is consistent with reentry programs supported by the Legislature and should be subject to the discretion of the local sheriff, not the sentencing judge…

Rest of the ongoing Massachusetts legal ego story is here, if you have the stomach for it.

There are many indications that people have been watching too many stupid movies.  One almost sure way to find examples of less than intelligent behavior is to combine something scary, like kidnapping, with a popular technology like GPS that every magazine and newspaper writer (and apparently even some product designers/marketers think they know something about, when, in point of fact, they haven’t a clue.

Worried about increasing kidnapping rates, some affluent Mexicans have reportedly figured out a way to fight the crime.

They are embedding tiny, crystal-encased chips under their skin in hopes of making themselves easier to find after an abduction. Mexican security firm Xega, which has designed the system, says it is gaining popularity among users.

The chip, supposed to be no bigger than a grain of rice, is usually injected in the arm.

A transmitter in the chip communicates with a small GPS-enabled box that is carried by the client, says Xega. And it is the box that reports the GPS coordinates to the company when the panic button is pressed. It’s a bit similar to GPS-tracking systems currently being marketed to pet owners.

What’s not clear is how the embedded chip helps in the process or what will happen if the kidnappers throw the GPS box out…. amen on that, Priya Ganapati , see full article on alleged GPS implants) and congratulations for being a lot smarter than the average feature writer when the initials G, P and S show up in a headline

Almost of a certainty the implanted "grain of rice" chip is a passive RFI chip.  It can be scanned by an active (powered) RFI reader to determine the number or alpha-numeric code the chip was manufactured with.  It is not a GPS "chip" by any stretch of the imagination.

The part that I see that has some merit in this somewhat less than obvious system is that if the perpetrators rip the external, easy to spot GPS device off the victim,the device will immediately "know" it is separated from it’s ‘asset" and presumably sound an alarm.

Also, should the perpetrators have a devious mind like mine, a clever ploy would be to rip the GPS unit off the victim and attach it to some other person, animal, or even a vehicle going far away from where the victim is being held.  Anyone, for example watch Frantic?

The extra step of "keying" the tracking collar to the protective asset should be an important step in keeping the asset from becoming a victim, but please headline writers, it is not an "injectable, rice-sized GPS chip", ok?

OK does that headline look a little ’snarky’?  Well I suppose it is.  I have worked with a number of municipal and country auditors in the past and tried to work with several state office … but they mostly look at the information that proves to them they are losing big time and say, "Ho hum, is it lunch time yet"?

This is a fact that will stand up to an audit.  You can take it to the bank.  Most states don’t even know how many sex offenders they have … or how many cars they have on the road for that matter.  Sad but true.

As far as knowing where any of them are?  Ha!  As we say in the state right across the Delaware from Pennsylvania … "Fugedaboudtit"!

The most typical excuse is "we don’t have the funding".  But ladies and gentlemen, that is a cop out.  EVERY state has the funding to track sex offenders, what most of them lack is the leadership and will to live up to their responsibilities.

A citizen commits a sex crime.  Fact of life, can’t be helped.  Said citizen must be punished both for his/her crime and to act as a deterrent to others,  It is the way our society works.  Has to be done, and every state is funded for various forms of law enforcement, courts and corrections.

Put the offenders back out on the street with the normal ‘check in every week or two with the parole officer’ model of probation and you get:

• Offenders who lie about where they have been, where they live and who make a mockery of the system
• Over-worked, under-funded parole officers who can’t keep up with the information they are being fed.
• Over-worked, under-funded law enforcement personnel waste effort in catching the same offenders again and again.
• More victims hurt by the same offender.  The saddest outcome of all.

"Put the bastards in jail and end the problem" you cry!  "Stop "mollycoddling" the offenders.  OK, fair enough,let’s look at that avenue:

• Over-crowded prisons.  Who will you release early to put the sex offender in?
• 10 to 20 times the cost to incarcerate versus supervised GPS tracking.
• No way to recover the costs to the state … prisoners can’t hold real jobs while inside in most cases.
• The offender’s family on welfare because you have the breadwinner locked up.
• The offender’s children, lacking a decent life and supervision starting the next generation of crime.

That doesn’t sound much to me as if there is any savings involved.  So what’s my solution (and auditor Wagner’s as well) is put a GPS tracking bracelet on them, charge them the cost of the GPS tracking program (hey, 99.9% of them are going to pay a modest monthly fee to stay out of jail, I surely would) and send them out to find their own place to sleep and get their own job to pay their bills.  The state saves fortune on prison operating costs, parole office operation costs, law enforcement time, welfare costs and even makes profit on the offenders when they pay their income taxes.  All pluses.

And the chances of those offenders repeating their crimes are cut by a factor of hundreds or even thousands.  Some GPS tracked parolees might commit a second crime but compared to unsupervised parolee’s re-offending the chances are varnishingly small.

Protect your citizens and save them money at the same time?  How great an idea is that?  Thanks Jack!

PA Auditor General Jack Wagner Recommends Use of GPS Technology to Keep Track of Registered Sex Offenders

Last update: 1:15 p.m. EDT July 22, 2008

HARRISBURG, Pa., July 22, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ — Special report finds that state didn’t know whereabouts of 923 offenders

Auditor General Jack Wagner today recommended that the Pennsylvania State Police and the Board of Probation and Parole should request that the General Assembly amend the state’s Megan’s Law to require five years of global positioning system (GPS) monitoring for sex offenders who break the state law requiring them to verify their addresses.

Wagner also recommended that the state police and probation board should request that the General Assembly amend Megan’s Law to require at least five years of GPS monitoring for all sexually violent predators whose victims are children.

Wagner made the recommendations in a special report, released today, which disclosed that, in early June, the state had lost track of 923, or nearly 10 percent, of the state’s approximately 9,800 registered sex offenders…  (read the rest of the article on GPS Tracking for Sex Offenders here, it’s worth a look)

I write often here on tracking criminals, parolees and ‘high risk juveniles with GPS.  The usual reason many law enforcement jurisdictions haven’t done much along these lines is the age old excuse every government worker uses to get out of work … or thinking … the "We have no money" line.

Here’s a nice piece from a rural county staring in a small way, but a county run by smart people who can do simple math.

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho  —  A northern Idaho county plans to start using GPS bracelets to track juvenile offenders.

…. She said high-risk juveniles on probation would be likely candidates for the bracelet. … Peterson said those in juvenile diversion usually are first-time offenders such as truants, runaways, or petty thieves. She said they are more likely to run away and would be good candidates for one of the bracelets.

The juveniles must agree to take part in the program.

So far, the county has only put the GPS bracelets on adults. The wearer pays the county $10 per day.

Mike Wall, administrator for the county’s Adult Misdemeanor Probation Department, said the devices work well… Full article here.

So the adult GPS supervision program works well.  And the county, as I have often advocated before, makes the wearers of the bracelets pay for the service.  They will likely all opt for that because by going into the GPS program they can be out and about … and work … saving the county further costs they would likely incur paying for support of the offender’s families.

But perhaps the juvies won’t/can’t pay?  It is still worth a fortune to society to get into this.  $10 a day is $3600 a year in round numbers.

In almost every state, prisoners in confinement cost more than $36,000 a year (plus the hidden welfare/loss of taxes burden).  In case math is not your forte’, just remember that with a radix 10 number system like we normally use, every zero place holder means ten time more.  So id the country puts the devices on say 10 misdemeanor juveniles in a year, that’s a burden of $36,000. If paying that one bill keeps, just for the sake of argument, two of them out of prison in the future (about 50% are destined to go on to bigger and better crimes in today’s justice system).  Anyway, just two per year are saved, the taxpayer makes a 100% rate of return … $36,000 spent, $72,000 not spent .  These numbers scale well for big or small populations.  Do the math.  GPS tracking can save a fortune for the taxpayer.

OH, and at the risk of sounding like an old softy … is preventing a minor offender from going off on the road to perdition and ‘hard time’ worth anything?  Probably not, unless it’s your kid, or your neighbors … or your nephew or grandson, etc.

It’s no secret I very much favor using GPS tracking to monitor criminals … of all shapes and sizes.  See

GPS and the ‘Hood — And Why I think It’s a Good Idea 

and

Business case for GPS Criminal Tracking 

for just a few samples.

A very sad fact that emerged last month and was pretty well hidden in the news of still more bombings and deaths in Iraq (after all those years of assurances) and the crashing of the US dollar round the world (do you think there’s a connection between Vietnam Redux Iraq and the depressed US economy?  naw ..))… anyway the fact I was alluding to is that more than 4 out of every 100 Americans are in jail or on parole.  That makes the criminal justice system a larger employer than Wal*Mart and McDonalds rolled together.  Staggering.  And we don’t seem to be getting any smarter.  See this link for the complete article:

… Global positioning devices monitoring adult criminals in Nova Scotia are not used on young offenders, a legislative committee heard Wednesday in Halifax…

Why not?  Where is prevention more appropriate than at a younger, more "moldable" age?

… A senior corrections official said the province is thinking of using such devices as ankle bracelets on young people. The devices are used to locate the whereabouts of adults on house arrest or probation.

But an opposition MLA said electronic supervision devices should be slapped on young offenders starting at about age 15.

New Democrat Graham Steele said perhaps if such a device had been attached to a 17-year-old boy charged in the stabbing death of Paul Charles Lawrence Saunders in Halifax about two weeks ago, police could have kept tabs on him before a murder was committed….

Ah, the answer from a "senior corrections official" .. we don’t do that because we don’t do that.  A good reason indeed.  let’s see, the use of a device already owned and used could have :

1. Saved the victim from being stabbed to death
2. Saved the perpetrator from becoming another sad felony statistic

But we don’t do it this way because, well, "that isn’t what the units are for".  The government mind at its finest.

… The teenager, who has a criminal record dating back almost two years, was on probation, including a curfew, when he was picked up after Mr. Saunders died of wounds sustained in an attack in an apartment building.

Mr. Steele, MLA for Halifax Fairview, said if global positioning locators work the way they’re supposed to, "I don’t see why you wouldn’t use a GPS unit" on an older teenager. …

Frankly, Mr. Steele, I certainly don’t see why not either … and I doubt that Mr. Saunders … who is no longer around to render his opinion would have objected either.  The perpetrator?  He might have objected, but has he had one he likely wouldn’t now be facing up to 80 years or so in jail.  "He’s guilty, we got him, he’ll get his now."  Yes, but at what cost?

When a teen commits a crime it’s a pretty sure sign she or he is not going to follow societies rules … the die is already cast.  As I see it, we have two choices:

• Do something to prevent the situation getting worse.  This is cheaper, by far to society in general and certainly of some benefit to the offender … better one crime on his record that 100.
• Sit back and watch while she or he commits further crimes, typically escalating into more and more violent ones, until the teen winds up as a senior citizen in jail, supported by the tax payer dollar and at the loss of all the talent for good she might have been blessed with at birth.

It’s pretty important, in my view, that law enforcement do what it can do to protect the ordinary citizen.  When a technology comes onboard that is proven to save money, save lives, and reduce the disastrous waste we have made of our justice system/prison industries, I can’t see many reasons not to use it … what’s your excuse?

My headline is the same slug than headed an article in a recent Seattle Time by Jennifer Sullivan (some excerpts and comments follow)  In my limited knowledge of how dead tree newspapers work I believe another anonymous person gets the credit for the “Teaser” head, but either way, it worked.  I jumped on the article because I was going to get some solid information about my one of my favorite subjects … how to separate rumor from fact and actually calculate an ROI (Return On Investment) for these devices and the “human-powered” system that must accompany them to make a GPS offended monitoring program work.  Alas, there’s a lot more simplistic thechno-speak about how the particular system chosen by the Washington State Department Of Corrections (DOC) works than cost/benefit data … but don’t get my wrong, Jennifer, there are some nuggets of great information here.

Are GPS devices for sex offenders worth it?

By Jennifer Sullivan  Seattle Times staff reporter

State sex offenders are tethered to GPS tracking devices.

More than 20 of the state’s most violent sex offenders are tethered to tracking devices that document their locations within a half-block.

The devices are at the heart of Gov. Christine Gregoire’s promise to keep people safe from sex predators. On Wednesday, the governor asked the state Legislature for $8.2 million to better monitor sex offenders.

Nearly $1 million would go toward purchasing the tracking sets for the Department of Corrections (DOC); About $5 million would pay for in-person visits of sex offenders by law enforcement.

But community corrections officers doubt whether the $1,500 devices — ankle bracelets, locator boxes designed to be strapped on people’s belts and charging units — would ensure that sex offenders are abiding by the terms of their parole. In the two months that a dozen trackers have been used in Seattle, one offender has thrown the device away and another let the battery die — making the devices useless. Both offenders were arrested and held on suspicion of violations….

(more…)

What if you had a business practice that had only about a 50% success rate and I offered you a service that would increase your yield to over 99% while reducing your annual costs by a factor of say, 100?  You would probably at least read further to see if I had something real in mind or if I had been smoking some prohibited substance, yes?

And what if I told you that you were already engaged in that 50% yield business even if you didn’t want to be?  Surprised, perhaps?

Well, you are in that business and so am I, the convicting and ‘warehousing” of criminals … especially the egregious form categorized as sex offenders. 

Don’t worry, you don’t have to take my word for the wildly optimistic performance claims though, read this excerpt:

TRENTON, N.J. - Electronic tracking bracelets worn by high-risk sex offenders on parole help prevent new assaults, the Parole Board has found.
Of 225 sex offenders monitored by Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, only one has been implicated in a new sex crime, according to a report released Wednesday.
“This monitoring strengthens public safety by tracking the most dangerous convicted sex offenders living in New Jersey communities,” Parole Board Chairman Peter Barnes Jr. said…. or read the whole article … it’s quite illuminating.

Recidivism of sexual predator type offenders has an alarmingly high rate.  50% or more repeat their crimes if paroled.  No matter what kind of medication, counseling or other state-funded programs are provided the (almost all) men repeat their crimes again and again.  The only real solution we allow in our present day society is to incarcerate the offenders (usually after they have repeated their crime while on parole and thus ruined at least two children’s lives).  Warehousing is a horribly expensive solution, running up into the $30,000 and more per year range … hundreds of thousands of dollars per prisoner lifetime.  Not to mention the tragedy of being unable to offer any alternative treatment.

But just pause for a moment and think on what the state of New jersey has found … more than proving my frequently expressed contention that GPS tracking for parolees (at the cost of a few hundred per year per offender) saves a fortune in money, saves children who will never know, and saves even the lives of these man who can thus contribute something to society … perhaps even supporting their own families … instead of repeating their crimes again and again.

If your state isn’t into this with both feet it is time to find out why?  GPS tracking does not cost, it pays and pays and pays.