Where Are We? - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 156

The criminal justice system uses gps technology extensively to track pro-
bationers, parolees, pretrial defendants, and people awaiting deportation hear-
ings. Radio frequency ankle bracelets emerged in the late 1970s as a tool to
enforce house arrests. Their use expanded when gps made it possible to track
the wearer continuously rather than simply sound an alert when he or she left
the house. Supervising officers can monitor travel to work or drug treatment
while getting an immediate notification if the offender enters an excluded
zone, such as a schoolyard or the neighborhood of a person with a restraining
order. 61 The ankle bracelet reached its greatest national prominence, perhaps,
in 2005, when the courts sentenced television celebrity Martha Stewart to
house arrest on her 150-acre estate. 62 They are not foolproof. The Guardian
(London) reported in 2011 that a suspect in Rochdale, England, tricked two
security guards into attaching a tracking device to his prosthetic leg, which he
later removed to violate curfew. 63 When a major electronic monitoring ven-
dor's computer system shut down for twelve hours in 2010, corrections offi-
cials in forty-nine states could not follow the movements of sixteen thousand
offenders they were tracking, although the offenders were unaware of the
lapse. 64 Complaints that correctional systems, in the United States and abroad,
rely too heavily on the technology arise whenever offenders commit crimes
while under electronic surveillance. 65 A Baltimore woman sued a gps tracking
vendor, Nebraska-based iSecureTrac, in mid-2012 after her ive-year-old daugh-
ter suffered permanent brain damage from a stray bullet fired by a juvenile
offender the company was monitoring. 66 The case is pending. Police rearrested
a Massachusetts defendant awaiting trial in early 2012 after a tracking system
showed he violated house arrest, but his lawyer successfully argued the read-
ings were false. 67 His expert witness, a civil engineer with extensive gps expe-
rience, testified that the home's construction and the weakness of satellite
signals indoors could have affected tracking results. 68
A 2012 U.S. Justice Department-sponsored study of more than six thousand
California sex offenders showed that real-time gps tracking was 30 percent
more expensive than traditional supervision but significantly more effective.
gps monitoring cost about $36 per day per parolee, compared to $27.50 per
day for traditional supervision, but traditionally monitored parolees were three
times more likely to commit a sex-related violation. 69 Incarceration in Califor-
nia at the time of the study cost about $129 per day. 70
The American Correctional Association reported that 22,192 people wore
electronic monitoring devices in 1999. 71 Today about one in forty-ive adults