GPS Tracking ROI

ok, seems like you can’t mention GPS without the word cost in the same sentence, even though the basic infrastructure of the technology is free and equipment is cheaper every day.

Secondly, when it comes to preventing crime, everyone thinks it’s good idea, but nobody wants to leap out and pay for it. Hard to blame anyone in government for not taking the lead on this either, nobody (except the police officer on the beat) actually gets paid to reduce crime.

The article I posted above, though, has some masterful thought behind it. It’s well worth a read and some thoughtful reflection. We all know crime ought to be reduced, and we all know there’s a huge emotional as well as a dollar and cents cost to crime. But there often seems so little that we can actually quantify. Doing the right thing is the thing to do and going good deeds is high on everyone’s list of “wanna dos”, but a bean counter can’t assign value to good deeds.

Well, let’s out on our bean counter hat and see is we can’t do some real world math here. First of all, we don’t know how to assign a value to the human cost of crime. The suffering of a rape victim, the problems the children of an incarcerated criminal face while growing up, the fear that sweeps over the store clerk when the crook points the gun at her .. these are horrible, tragic things, but since we are pretending to be verified bean counters we must assign them all a dollars and cents cost of zero.

Now, for every crime there is a perpetrator. Our law enforcement system (a very expensive service of society, by the way) has the task of preventing (when possible) the commission of crime, and when a crime does occur, apprehending the criminal. From there the criminal enters the justice system and likely as not will be incarcerated, or place don supervised parole, if found guilty.

There is probably no one reading this message who hasn’t, at some point in their life, had the urge to commit a crime. What stopped us? Well, moral teachings, conscience, but (come clean now), the thought that we might get arrested and go to jail. Goodness knows how many assinine supervisors are alive or how many diamond rings are still in the jewelry store showcase because of the fear of incarceration. But obviously, this fear isn’t enough, because hundreds of thousands of crimes still get committed each year and one has to assume that the vast majority of the perpetrators knew about the police and the legal system.

Actually, many of those perpetrators were just poker players. depending on the crime and the area you commit it, the chances of actually getting caught can be relatively small. Too large for you and I perhaps, but for a high stakes player, not all that bad. So it’s pretty clear we need something extra in addition to the present system to stare potential crooks in the eye and make them weight the odds more closely.

When a violator is convicted and sent to prison he or she obviously won’t be committing any more crimes from the inside, but remember that bean counter hat? It costs about $30,000 a year, on average, to incarcerate a prisoner. Put a thousand crooks behind bars and you’re looking at 30 million bucks, per year, to keep them from committing another crime.

Obviously, we don’t try to lock up every offender, for life. We couldn’t afford to. So we let them out on supervised parole. This costs money too, but a lot less. The problem has always been, it’s impractical to have parole office/parolee contact more frequently than every week or so, at best, and a hell of a lot of crime can happen in a week. So, more crime gets committed and more parolee’s get yanked back into the prison system, at $30k per year.

Enter GPS tracking. For about $3200 a year an offender can be monitored 24×7. Right away we are looking at a nearly 10 to 1 cost savings. With a properly administered system the terms of release can be set up in any appropriate way. An offender can be allowed out on “house arrest”, only being given permission to leave his residence for work and other authorized tasks, s/he can be allowed to go anywhere excepting ares prohibited by the terms of the release programs, hours of the day, days of the week, literally any restriction desired can be designed in at no extra cost.

If a 10 to 1 savings isn’t enough, remember that the offender can be made to pay any or all of the cost of the system. Monetary fines are typical of many sentences, there’s absolutely no reason that the fine could not be assessed to cover the cost of the surveillance. So we could be looking at nearly a 100% savings. Bean counters should actually be rubbing their hands in glee.

Lastly, consider one other phenomenon not directly calculable on a spreadsheet. In my experience using GPS tracking to monitor truck fleets, business vehicles and teenage drivers, it’s easily shown that the fact that the subjects are being monitored has a direct bearing on their tendency to make the right choices. Once drivers know that all their speeding will be shown, or that non-use of their seatbelt will be directly monitored, their behavior changes, predictably, so that they commit offenses at a much, much lower rate. It’s easy to see how widespread use of GPS tracking will cause a very large percentage of offenders to calculate the odds differently so that their “poker equation” works out much closer to a normal person’s. Thus the human cost of crime, which we agreed at the beginning is huge, but not readily expressed in arithmetic terms will be substantially lower. This is another great gain to society and it comes along as a free bonus to the actual arithmetic cost savings.

So, if you’re involved in the criminal punishment/crime prevention business … or you vote for people who are, next time you hear the old “we have no money” refrain you now know that whole excuse is false and non-thinking. let;s think like a “bean counter” and make our world a safer, better place to live and save a fortune while we’re doing it.