GPS Tracking of Offenders Saves a Lot
We’ve done quite a few articles here on the GPS Tracking ROI blog about the ower of using GPS tracking for parolees and other criminal-related subjects who have only been tracked by manual means until GPS tracking came along. For example you might like to look at:
GPS Tracking and Recidivism — Saving Money and Children or
GPS Tracking Has Pretty Simple Economics or
Are GPS Devices For Sex Offenders Worth It?
for just a few examples … or use the Search Box up there at the top of the left column.
The bottom line is, GPS tracking for offenders is worth its weight in gold, literally. Even when it doesn’t work as well as it should, it is still good.
Several months back I wrote about an incident in Connecticut that had turned into quite a political slanging match. A parolee was allegedly lost by the contractor doing the monitoring for the state and one and another politician began shouting over each other to be heard about how they wanted things fixed, and fixed now.
As I pointed out in my article on why the GPS tracking was working all the time and why you can’t really use it to monitor literally every footstep of a subject … Want To Be Happy With GPS Tracking? Read The Spec… a state study has concluded the sytem or the contractor running it did not actually fail. Some changes in procedures and expectations have been amade and massacgusetts will go on from there. See the full article on the report to improve gps tracking here.
Often states and other government agencies don’t release their costs on GPS tracking. In this case I see a very interesting set of figures in a sidebar on the left of the article. The state tracks 3,100 offenders at an annual cost of $950,000. That’s about $306.00 a year per subject, well under a dollar a day. To put these individuals ‘in the pen’ would cost a minimun of $30,000 each per year or well over $90,000,00 per year. That means for every subject where the state is substituing GPS tracking for incarceration the savings are over 900%.
Now in today’s economic climate does the fact you might be wasting 900% of your budget make you think a little harder about GPS tracking?