Officials: Parole via GPS hits the spot
Staff Writer
Two Trenton sex offenders became the first under the state’s new satellite monitoring program to be charged with violating terms of their lifetime parole, prompting parole officials and lawmakers to deem the program a quick success.
One offender, Richard Tyler, was caught sharing a bed with a juvenile and tested positive for cocaine, a parole board official said.
The other, Jean Green, went from Trenton to Morrisville, Pa., without permission to leave New Jersey…. Rest of article here:
Couldn’t resist a little post today on this news item. I’ve mentioned it before but many of the articles were promises of what was to come instead of down to earth progress reports that show immediate gains in both public safety and return on investment (ROI).
The State of New Jersey (my home state by the way, Kiss My Tomatoes) recently mandated that sex offenders would be tracked using GPS bracelets. The initial program was set up to do 250 offenders and so far only 28 have been equipped and brought into the program. In less than three weeks the program has identified two significant violators and taken them off the streets.
In one case the offense was particularly egregious, the offender was literally tracked by GPS to the bed of a juvenile … one shudders to think how many other offenders not GPS equipped have repeated their crimes so soon after being released on probation … and how many such offenses have gone undetected. Assuming any degree of intelligence of the offender at all, to repeat that soon with the full knowledge he was being watched by probation officers indicates the severity of this problem. These folks are in many cases not just miscreants, they are folks suffering from urges that no law, no moral guidance, nothing short of confinement or full-time monitoring can overcome.
The article points up some interesting side issues/potential savings that probably weren’t factored in at the beginning of the process. In just weeks prosecutors have asked for reports on a number of previous offenders who, with GPS, could be shown not to have been in the vicinity of new crimes and thus did not waste valuable investigative crime being cleared or convicted by normal one foot in front of the other police work.
Several offenders who were suspect were cleared with GPS knowledge, and while it’s easy to say one doesn’t care all that much about the rights of someone already convicted of these kind of crimes there’s certainly no purpose served by pinning false offenses on anyone. Not to mention that if a previous offender got caught up in a misguided “round up the usual suspects” sort of investigation and the person were actually innocent, an additional despicable criminal would have gotten away scot free.
If you’ve involved in ant way with your community’s parole system, even as an interested private citizen, the time to prod your officials to take action is NOW . Our children deserve the extra level of protection and your state or country budget deserves the cost saving. Note that the New jersey program costs $12,50 per monitored offender per day. The nation-wide average for incarcerating these folk is upwards of $30,000 a year in most states. In New Jersey at the end of last year (Nov 2005) the cost of a non-death penalty prisoner was well over $45,000. So here we have a tool that will save 90%, that’s right, 90% (when’s the last time you saved 90% on anything?) of the cost to the state and in addition we put these folks out on the street under safe circumstances where they can earn a living and pay state taxes, saving even more. It’s a very cut and dried matter of why spend 10 times as much for an inferior solution?