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Prison Without Walls

Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure. But what if the prisons could be turned inside out, with convicts released into society under constant electronic surveillance? Radical though it may seem, early experiments suggest that such a science-fiction scenario might cut crime, reduce costs, and even prove more just.
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Fredrik Broden

ONE SNOWY NIGHT last winter, I walked into a pizzeria in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, with my right pant leg hiked up my shin. A pager-size black box was strapped to my sockless ankle, and another, somewhat larger unit dangled in a holster on my belt. Together, the two items make up a tracking device called the BI ExacuTrack AT: the former is designed to be tamper-resistant, and the latter broadcasts the wearers location to a monitoring company via GPS. The device is commonly associated with paroled sex offenders, who wear it so authorities can keep an eye on their movements. Thus my experiment: an online guide had specified that the restaurant I was visiting was a family joint. Would the moms and dads, confronted with my anklet, identify me as a possible predator and hustle their kids back out into the cold? Well, no, not in this case. Not a soul took any notice of the gizmos I wore. The whole rig is surprisingly small and unobtrusive, and it allowed me to eat my slice in peace. Indeed, over the few days that I posed as a monitored man, the closest I came to feeling a real stigma was an encounter I had at a Holiday Inn ice machine, where a bearded trucker type gave me a wider berth than I might otherwise have expected. All in all, it didnt seem like such a terrible fate. Unlike most of ExacuTracks clientele, of course, I wore my device by choice and only briefly, to find out how it felt and how people reacted to it. By contrast, a real sex offenderor any of a variety of other lawbreakers, including killers, check bouncers, thieves, and drug usersmight wear the unit or one like it for years, or even decades. He (and the offender is generally a he) would wear it all day and all night, into the shower and under the sheetsperhaps with an AC adapter cord

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all day and all night, into the shower and under the sheetsperhaps with an AC adapter cord snaking out into a wall socket for charging. The device would enable the monitoring company to follow his every move, from home to work to the store, and, in consultation with a parole or probation officer, to keep him away from kindergartens, playgrounds, Jonas Brothers concerts, and other places where kids congregate. Should he decide to snip off the anklet (the band is rubber, and would succumb easily to pruning shears), a severed cable would alert the company that he had tampered with the unit, and absent a very good excuse he would likely be sent back to prison. Little wonder that the law-enforcement officer who installed my ExacuTrack noted that he was doing me a favor by unboxing a fresh unit: over their lifetimes, many of the trackers become encrusted with the filth and dead skin of previous bearers, some of whom are infected with prison plagues such as herpes or hepatitis. Officers clean the units and replace the straps between users, but I strongly preferred not to have anything rubbing against my ankle that had spent years rubbing against someone elses. Increasingly, GPS devices such as the one I wore are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that, in the United States at least, traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace. According to a recent Pew report, 2.3 million Americans are currently incarcerated enough people to fill the city of Houston. Since 1983, the number of inmates has more than tripled and the total cost of corrections has jumped sixfold, from $10.4 billion to $68.7 billion. In California, the cost per inmate has kept pace with the cost of an Ivy League education, at just shy of $50,000 a year. This might make some sense if crime rates had also tripled. But they havent: rather, even as crime has fallen, the sentences served by criminals have grown, thanks in large part to mandatory minimums and draconian three-strikes rulespolitically popular measures that have shown little deterrent effect but have left the prison system overflowing with inmates. The vogue for incarceration might also make sense if the prisons repaid societys investment by releasing reformed inmates who behaved better than before they were locked up. But that isnt the case either: half of those released are back in prison within three years. Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be scared straight, is actively counterproductive. Such conditionsand U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assaulttypically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in. Devices such as the ExacuTrack, along with other advances in both the ways we monitor criminals and the ways we punish them for their transgressions, suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers. The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain. Moreover, such a change would in fact be less radical than it might at first appear. An underappreciated fact of our penitentiary system is that of all Americans serving time at any given moment, only a third are actually behind bars. The restsome 5 million of themare circulating among the free on conditional supervised release either as parolees, who are freed from prison before their sentences conclude, or as probationers, who walk free in lieu of jail time. These prisoners-on-the-outside have in fact outnumbered the incarcerated for decades. And recent innovations, both technological and procedural, could enable such programs to advance to a stage where they put the traditional model of incarceration to shame. In a number of experimental cases, they already have. Devices such as the one I wore on my leg already allow tens of thousands of convicts to walk the streets relatively freely, impeded only by the knowledge that if they loiter by a schoolyard, say, or near the house of the ex-girlfriend they threatened, or on a street corner known for its crack trade, the law will come to find them. Compared with incarceration, the cost of such surveillance is minusculemere dollars per day and monitoring has few of the hardening effects of time behind bars. Nor do all the innovations being developed depend on technology. Similar efforts to control criminals in the wild are under way in pilot programs that demand adherence to onerous parole guidelines, such as frequent, random drug testing, and that provide for immediate punishment if the parolees fail. The result is the same: convicts who might once have been in prison now walk among us unrecognizedlike pod people, or Canadians. There are, of course, many thousands of dangerous felons who cant be trusted on the loose. But if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too

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do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such prisons without bars would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society. IN THE 18TH CENTURY, the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, a hypothetical prison. Inside the Panopticon (the name is derived from the Greek word for all-seeing), the prisoners are arranged in a ring of cells surrounding their guard, who is concealed in a tower in the center. The idea is that the guard controls the prisoners through his presumed observation: they constantly imagine his eyes on them, even when hes looking elsewhere. Bentham promoted the concept of the Panopticon for much the same reasons that spur criminal-justice innovation todaya ballooning prison population and the need for a cheap solution with light manpower demands. Whereas the guard in Benthams day had only two eyes, however, todays watcher can be virtually all-seeing, thanks to GPS monitoring technology. The modern prisoner, in other words, need not wonder whether he is being observed; he can be sure that he is, and at all times. The hub of the American penal systems largest open-air Panopticon is in the Indianapolis suburb of Anderson, population 57 ,496, at the call center of a company called BI Incorporated. The firm manufactures and services the ankle device I test-drove, as well as a suite of other law-enforcement gadgets designed to track offenders. Though BI has a handful of rivals in the monitoring business, it is the most prominent and best-known, with 55,000 offenders wearing BI anklets at any given moment. (The company monitors another 10,000 using lower-tech means: for instance, by having them call from particular landlines at designated times.) I drove to Anderson from Indianapolis, past clapboard houses and cornfields, to visit BIs offices, located on a few discreet and highly secure floors above the local branch of KeyBank. I was buzzed up to meet Jennifer White, the BI vice president in charge of monitoring. From her office window, we looked out not on the backs of the 30,000 offenders this branch monitors, but on the sedate midwestern bedroom community that is, by her description, a little bit less happening than Muncie, 20 miles away. Even the sleepy streets of Anderson have their secrets, though. White told me that below us were about 120 criminals with BI ankletsroughly one for every 500 residents in the town. White, an Indiana native, has been at BI since 1988. Over a turkey salad from Bob Evans, she explained that the companys first clients (as the monitored are always called) were not human beings but Holsteins. In 197 8, BI began selling systems that allowed dairy farmers to dispense feed to their cows automatically. The company fitted a radio-frequency tag on each cows ear so that when the cow approached the feed dispenser, a sensor in the latter caused it to drop a ration of fodder. If the same cow returned, the sensor recognized the unique signal of the tag and prevented the cow from getting a second helping until after enough time had passed for her to digest the first. (The worlds of bovine and criminal management have in fact been oddly intertwined for many years. Just as modern abattoirs have studied the colors that can distract and agitate cows during their final momentsthus ruining their meat with adrenalineprisons have painted their walls in soothing shades to minimize anxiety and aggression in their inmates.) In the 1980s, BI expanded into tethering people. As an early mover in the outpatient prison industry, BI grew fast, and the Anderson office contains a one-room museum of the bulky devices from its early days, some the size of a ham-radio set. The company now counts tracking people as its core business, and as a sideline it facilitates their reentry into society, through treatment programs and counseling. BI monitors criminals in all 50 states, everyone from people who owe child support to ax murderers, White told me. Most use the lowest-tech tracking equipment, a radio-frequency-based technology that monitors house arrest. The system works simply: you keep a radio beacon in your home and a transmitter around your ankle. If you wander too far from your beacon, an alert goes out to the BI call center in Anderson, which then notifies your probation officer that you have left your designated zoneas Martha Stewart allegedly did during her BImonitored house arrest in 2005, earning a three-week extension of her five-month sentence. The truly revolutionary BI devices, though, are the new generation of GPS trackers, which monitor criminals real-time locations down to a few meters, enabling BI to control their movements almost as if they were marionettes. If you were a paroled drunk driver, for instance, your parole officer could mandate that you stay home every day from dusk until dawn, be at your workplace from nine to five, and go to and from work following a specific routeand BI would monitor your movements to ensure compliance. If your parole terms included not entering a bar or liquor shop, the device could be programmed to start an alert process if you lingered near such a location for more than 60 seconds. That alert could take the form of an immediate notice to the monitorsHes at Drinkies againor even a spoken warning emanating from the device itself, instructing you to leave the area or face the consequences. Another BI system, recently deployed with promising results, features an electrostatic pad that presses against the offenders upper arm at all times, chemically tasting sweat for signs of alcohol. (In May, starlet Lindsay Lohan was ordered to wear a similar device, manufactured by a BI competitor, after violating her probation stemming from DUI charges.) To see the BI systems at work is to realize that Jeremy Bentham was thinking small. The call center consists of just a few rows of desks, with a dozen or so men and women wearing headsets and speaking in Spanish and English to their customers (the law-enforcement agents, as distinguished from the tracked clients). Each sits in front of a computer monitor, and at the click of a mouse can
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summon up a screen detailing the movements of a client as far away as Guam, ensuring not only that he avoids exclusion zonesschoolyards or bars or former associates homes, depending on the circumstancesbut also that he makes his way to designated inclusion zones at appointed times. As a fail-safe against any technological glitch, whether accidental or malicious, BI is immensely proud of its backup systems, which boast an ultrasecure data room and extreme redundancy: if, say, a toxic-gas cloud were to wipe out the town of Anderson, the last act of the staff there would be to flip the switches diverting all call traffic to BIs corporate office in Boulder, Colorado, where a team capable of taking over instantly in case of disaster is always on duty. I asked Jamie Roberts, a call-center employee who had previously been a BI customer as a corrections officer in Terre Haute, Indiana, to show me a parolee on the move, and in seconds he pulled up the profile of a criminal in Newport News, Virginia. The young mans parole officer had used a Microsoft Bing online map to build a large irregular polygon around his high schoolan inclusion zone that would guarantee an alert if he failed to show up for class on time, every day. Roberts showed me one offender after another: names and maps, lives scheduled down to the minute. There was a gambler whose anklet was set to notify Roberts if the client approached the waterfront, because he might try his luck on the gaming boats; an addict who couldnt return to the street corners where he used to score crack; and an alcohol abuser who had to squeeze himself into an inclusion zone around a church basement for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting from 9 to 10 p.m., three times a week. A strict parole officer could plausibly sketch out a complete weekly routine for his parolee, with specific times when he would have to leave home and specific stations he would have to tag throughout the week. He might allow, or even require, the parolee to go to the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon, and go for a jog along an authorized route every morning. Roberts pulled up another Bing map for me, and set in motion a faster-than-real-time playback of one clients day. As his dot carefully skirted the exclusion zones around a school and a park, staying away from kids because of the absolute certainty that BI would report him if he did not, his life on the outside looked fully set out in advance, as if he moved not on his own feet but on rails laid by his parole officer. For BI clients, technology has made detection of any deviation a near certaintyand with detection a swift response, one that often leads straight back to the Big House. Previous 1 2 3 Single Page | Next

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Abelli 2 y ears ago

After Catch and Release, By Margaret Talbot, New America Foundation The Atlantic Monthly | February 1, 2003 http://www.newamerica.net/publ... another progressive article in a nation with world wide highest prisoner rate. However, lawmakers follow the money trail and push tough on crime and merciless public opinion. Will the follow up article follow 7 y ears later?
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mesorensen 2 y ears ago

GraemeAn excellent and very interesting article, but one sentence bothers me: "rather, even as crime has fallen, the sentences served by criminals have grown". Where is the evidence that the sentence shouldn't be written: "as the sentences served by criminals have grown, crime has fallen"? The obvious argument is that, y eah, are prisons are a discrace, etc. etc., but at least crime is down because we've locked up every troublemaker out there, and I'm wondering how y ou would counter that. Thanks.
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wsinger 2 y ears ago

If we're honest, we'll admit that incarceration rates and crime rates have a very complex relationship. There are a couple way s of looking at this important question. In a 2005 briefing paper, the nonprofit Sentencing Project examined US incarceration and crime rates over time. The paper reported "no consistent relationship between the rate at which incarceration increased and the rate at which crime decreased." During the 1990s, states like California and Texas dramatically increased the number of people incarcerated, and they experienced significant drops in the crime rate. But at the same time, the crime rate in New York fell slightly more, even though New York's prison population grew relatively slowly . See also a very straightforward chart Figure 5 on page 7, showing that the US crime rate was roughly the same in 2003 as in 1970, even though the US incarceration rate grew fivefold during that time. Others, including the author of a recent article in The Economist, have noted that the US has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. If there were a straightforward connection between locking up more people and reducing crime, we'd expect that the US would also have one of the world's lowest crime rates. While variations in legal and statistical standards vastly complicate international comparisons (and ruin at least one wikipedia table), it's safe to say that the US is not the safest country in the world, or close to it. To me, Mr. Wood's assertion seems well grounded.
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mesorensen 2 y ears ago

wsingerThank y ou for the response. That's good information, and a solid counter to the argument I've heard.
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JamesonK 2 y ears ago

It's a good thing the picture is of a white man. Can't have it any other way .

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ALICEDEWONDER 2 y ears ago

Will we be putting them on our politicians as well? - PLEASE!
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Jozef_2 2 y ears ago

High time we did this. What a waste of resources and human lives to have so many nonviolent offenders in prison. Although technology is intrusive it can help to distinguish the guilty from the innocent and to manage offenders.
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Rob Tierney 1 y ear ago

Good points in article and in the comments. Re: intrusiveness - if someone wants to retain his or her "rights" to privacy , he or she should steer clear of criminal activity . People need to take more responsibility for their individual behavior and be held accountable.
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VCubed 2 y ears ago

In SF, CA, those ankle 'bracelets' cost offenders $1,000 per month, paid to a private corporation, not to the city /district/state. As with all legal matters, what y ou can pay a lawy er is what really decides how long y ou stay cuffed & pay ing. You can be law-abiding, in school, working, and still have to wear it and pay , unless y ou can get a lawy er to fight it.
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jailbait 2 y ears ago

True, the money is paid to a private corporation by the individual who is accused of a crime, but the taxpay ers don't have to foot the bill. When I was wearing mine, I was going to work every day and taking classes at the local University . That being said, I was wearing it for a reason despite being law-abiding 99.9% of the time. My lawy er had nothing to do with me getting it taken off, but my good behavior did. They could tell I was being good too, because they were watching me! I do agree that states and local governments should think about taking this service in house as a revenue producing opportunity instead of farming it out to corporations.
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menckenlite 2 y ears ago

Henry Louis Mencken: First they pass laws [create technology ] to use against the sons of bitches. Then they use them against the rest of us. Technology is amoral. Historically every new invention was used for both good and evil. What is to stop criminals e.g. from placing monitoring devices on vehicles to reveal when a person is far enough away for his/her home?
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Eric Bauer 2 y ears ago

What's to stop them now, that kind of technology already exisits.
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phidipides 2 y ears ago

Uhhh...don't look now...but this is being done to y ou without warrant through y our cell phone and OnStar by pinging cell towers or using y our phones built in GPS. You ARE an inmate. You just don't realize it. http://www.opednews.com/articl...

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http://paranoia.dubfire.net/20...
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menckenlite 2 y ears ago

Police have and use a lot of high tech weapons that they do not broadcast to the public. If police use these high tech weapons y ou can be certain that organized crime is also using them. Now that the US Government is run by the Crime Families National Commission, the FBI and their obedient police agencies target critics of government and not criminals. The recent arrests of ten Russian agents and quick return to Russia by Obama's legal wizard AG indicates the attitude of the elected officials to criminals -- Cover it up. As Noam Chomsky observed the goal is to keep the herd bewildered.
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Matt Landry 2 y ears ago

"For optimists of human nature, it is a melancholy realization that the highest function of humanity can be, to some extent, outsourced to a plastic box." If someone thinks that the conscience function of reminding a person not to commit crimes is "the highest function of humanity ", then "optimist" is not the word _I_ would use to describe that person...
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Stephane de Messieres 2 y ears ago

A fascinating article! Well-written and truly thought-provoking. We need more discussion like this that recognizes the utter failure of status quo. With appreciation for the comments above by 'mesorensen' and 'wsinger,' I'm surprised that Graeme Wood didn't even discuss ex ante deterrence in the article. In other words, if criminals prefer tracking to prison then wouldn't that diminish the (hy pothetical) deterring power of incarceration? Personally I'm not persuaded that incarceration is very effective as a deterrent to crime - especially after seeing the comment by 'wsinger' - but I know a lot of folks believe it is and I think it should be addressed at least briefly in the article.
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spirukas goblinono 2 y ears ago

Thanks 1bobcohn (Twitter) for the link to an article about surveillance of prisoners but I suspect there is a lot more to this than meets the ey e, or ears, or ankles. Prisons have become a big business ( I forget the name of the company that is a major stakeholder in airlines, credit cards, security and prisons all over the world - Google knows!) but I don't think that private enterprise controlling convicted criminals is a fair deal. It is not "mandatory minimums' and 'draconian 3 strike rules' that place people in prisons for the safety of society , but big business interests that are feeding off the paranoia of the 'climate of fear' foisted on the the public since the debacle of 9/11. It seems easier for government to pass their problems onto private enterprise than actually address the factors that are leading to total cultural collapse of our society . I don't fall for the spin that this process 'cuts crime', 'reduces costs' and aids management of our penal colonies. What is does is fulfill George Orwell's prophecies of "1984" - we are coming under increasing observation and recording of our activities, innocent or not, and we are slowly being indoctrinated to accept this as normal - it is not! It is an infringement of our rights. Why don't we try doing something useful with our penal colonies if they are so overcrowded and unmanageable - like send them to desolate places on the planet to develop failed communities or wasted resources. Set them to work repairing the damage the vampire corporates do as they suck the resources and life out of this planet. Why not put them all to sea on floating prison farms that scour the planet as mobile fix-it crews. Better still, why not just pack 'em all off to that 'Great Floating Pacific Garbage Patch' and set them to work for that Dutch group 'WHIM Architecture' to help fulfill that dream of turning all that floating rubbish into a compact artificial island. Don't send 'em home alone where they can do drugs, don't get 'em behind walls busting up rocks and beating out car license plates - get them out recy cling refuse and doing housework around the planet!
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jailbait 2 y ears ago

I was recently on electronic surveillance (white woman in on a domestic issue, in case y ou were wondering). The choice was given to me to stay in jail for 10 day s (at the cost of the taxpay ers) or get

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out of jail and be monitored by the Sherriff's office (at my cost - roughly $15/day ). I was given an ankle monitor, a home monitor which plugged into the wall, and a bulking looking cel phone contraption which could pinpoint my location and could tell if I had been drinking. As someone who has been involved in drug and alcohol treatment in the past, this was BY FAR the most effective means of getting me to stop drinking and follow the rules set for my release. (curfew, etc.) The certainty of being caught and the fear of returning to jail were very strong deterrents to misbehaving, with freedom being the reward. Treatment and AA meetings actually made me want to drink more because of the constant Pavlovian reminders of what I was missing out on. The state I live in, Oregon, spends more on prisons than education. Why not shift this cost to the people who did the crime and save the very expensive prisons for the violent criminals who have to be locked up to keep society safe? Believe me, screwing up is not an option when the Sherriff's office is Big Brothering y our every move.
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Hackpiper 2 y ears ago

First off, good for y ou for straightening out! This really is a good idea, and a strong incentive to fly right. The prisons should be limited to the dangerous ones. Period. I dont think most people belong there under any circumstances. Every one else should be on a sliding sy stem of work release, and more stringent controls and community service for those who dont stay clean. The idea is to keep all the but the worst as contributing members of society . God be with y ou ..keep strong!
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Scott 2 y ears ago

Why not just outfit every one with a tag at birth? Schools are already monitoring kids to see where they go, the government can track y our car without a warrant, etc. Why stop at prisoners? Just allow the government to track every one all the time. Even better, instead of sentencing people to prison, sentence them pick lettuce or work at McDonald's or be a CFO. That way , corporations won't have to pay employ ees--every one can work for free! You jay walked--that's two y ears of making lattes for y ou!
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paintedreal 2 y ears ago

I really have a problem with having sex offenders out on the street. Especially if they 've sexually molested a child!!! Why not use these monitors on drug dealers/drug users, or more white collar crimes? I don't care if y ou are being monitored. If y ou've sexually molested a child I don't think giving y ou a break is called for. Just my opinion.
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Hackpiper 2 y ears ago

Good point...BUT the "sex offender" registry has become a ludicrous kludge that lumps all sorts of offenders - major and minor - together. Thus, the stupid schlubs caught by internet stings for underage pictures are on there right next to the potentially dangerous predators who have assaulted someone. It's worse than worthless -- it ruins people for relatively minor offenses, and actually makes it much more difficult to ID the dangerous ones. You can thank the hideous "mandatory sentencing" rules - enacted at the behest of the self-serving "corrections industry " to fill up their prisons...and in response to rightist hy steria and ignorance - for this disaster. We need to get rid the registry and be much more precise about all this. If so, I would definitely agree that a real sex offender needs to prove their reform bey ond a shadow before being released.
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Butch 2 y ears ago

You couldn't be more right if y ou tried!! And I'm looking at it from a totally different perspective than y ou are, believe me. I've served time. One hell of a lot of time; Twenty -seven y ears as a matter of fact. I don't think there's any body on the planet that hates those child molesting effers more than I do. As far as I'm concerned they shouldn't even waste time taking them to trial. Just drag the bastard out to the local landfill, set up a wood chipper, and feed them in, slowly !!! I may have served over twenty -five y ears of my life in prison, but I didn't rape any one; I didn't rob
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have served over twenty -five y ears of my life in prison, but I didn't rape any one; I didn't rob any one; I didn't steal any thing, and I didn't molest any child or mistreat any old people. All I did was defend my self, against the son of someone with too much local power in a rinky -dink berg. I saw so many people in prison that never should have been there that I still shake my head when I think about it. Part of the problem that not many see or understand is the prison industry has grown so large and has so many people working for it that it would be a major hit for the local economies to downsize prisons by putting ankle monitors on all the ones that could reduce the incarceration rate. And believe me, there are some good people that work for the department of corrections in probably all of the states, but there's also a bunch of Neanderthal S.O.B.s that couldn't get a job any where else working there. Regardless, they contribute to the local coffers and no politician wants to be the one to downsize prisons or reduce the incarceration rates. I have several friends that have served over thirty y ears of their lives where I was incarcerated. One has served over forty -five y ears; From the time he was eighteen y ears old, and for being in a car with another guy that pulled up to a convenience store and robbed and killed the clerk. Totally senseless!! But as I said. Don't look for the monitor issue to jump into high gear any time soon. It makes way too much sense!
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Aliza Panitz 1 y ear ago

It could be worse -- in Louisiana prostitutes who offer vaginal sex get misdemeanor convictions, and prostitutes who offer oral or anal sex ("unnatural acts") get tagged as sex offenders, sometimes ending up on the registry for life. (No, not the johns, just the sextrade workers.) When y ou get ten postcards a y ear announcing a new sex offender in y our neighborhood, y ou tend to ignore all of them...
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Alan Dike 2 y ears ago

The have made a device that could fool GPS receivers back in 2008 that would fit in a briefcase. Turn that on, and y ou have a time period where y ou can go any where and y our transmitter say s y ou are still at home. Get back before the battery runs out and y ou just by passed the sy stem. Neat idea, but it's too easy to by pass.
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Raymond Lau 2 y ears ago

But what if the crack trade comes to them?
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nayrki 2 y ears ago

There are a few major problems with this idea : 1. GPS tracking devices are far from tamper proof. Those ankle bracelets can be removed by many people (dependent on body ty pe) without setting off the tamper detector. 2. Even if the tamper protection works, the police would not be able to arrive before the convict escaped. And with millions of more bracelets to track, convicts would be dropping those things left and right.
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ItsMySoapBox 2 y ears ago

There was a Sy Fi movie in 1991 named Wedlock, with Rutger Haeur and Mimi Rodgers. In this unisex prison, each inmate has an unknown partner; when the two are separated by more than 100 y ards, or they approach a wireless boundary , an explosive collar kills both inmates. I think we could adapt that with GPS; and limit the inmates to a certain radius or house arrest. The unit could be used to monitor alcohol use, lewd and lascivious behavior by pedophiles (increased heart rate, priapism, etc.). Instead of the explosive ty pe of collar used in the movie, although tempting, how about an incapacitating shock delivered to render the inmate/parole helpless and ready for pickup to a lock down facility .
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Matthew McDermott 2 y ears ago

This I like! These devices should be coupled with a Taser-like device which can deliver an incapacitating shock. The device should offer a warning, such as a noise or vibration, to the offender. Should the offender fail to leave a restricted area, call the 5 O's and drop his ass to the
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ground and hit him every X minutes until the police take him off to do his time inside! Fear of being caught is good, fear of BIG pain, then getting caught is better!
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Marty_Mae 2 y ears ago

The concept is great, but what about the ones that murder and rape, especially those who choose the elderly and children. After working in a prison sy stem for 17 y ears y ou realize why we have a prison sy stem. We do lock up too many for petty crimes, more serious offenders should be behind bars. We do need alternative such as Drug Courts which have a very high success rate, but we will still need places to incarcerate the worst of the worst. Martha M Schmidt
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CaughtMeScreaming 2 y ears ago

I was just in a random coffee shop in Orlando today and a chick mentioned this article to me. Id love to chat, we should have exchanged emails :) I hope y ou read this and reply ! Love light and blessings!
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8 inch gps crv 1 y ear ago

It's a good thing the picture is of a white man. Can't have it any other way .
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SC 2 y ears ago
I appreciate any focus on the "hidden" crisis in America: The prison sy stem. Of course, the suggested alternative as commendable as it is, only offers a degree of preventative measure. We need deeper preventative solutions. See my small suggestion: http://thinkpoint.wordpress.co... Steve Cornell www.thinkpoint.wordpress.com
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juliannemckinney 2 y ears ago

Im glad to see that y ou are cognizant of potential abuses in this prison without walls sy stem, Mr. Wood. Why not explore the possibility further? Consider, for example, the possibility of recruiting 15-to-20 percent of the population as volunteer enforcers of this sy stem. They can be recruited from all levels of society , especially at the neighborhood level and in employ ment environments. The homes of these volunteer do-gooders can be used as bases of operation where the latest in electronic surveillance and weapons technologies can be employ ed for purposes of persuading any intransigent paroled felon of the need for total obedience, as a minimum. These electronic technologies will ensure that the paroled felon is imaged and tracked any where and every where in his home around the clock. And just to keep the dastardly creature on his toes, especially if he display s perceivable attitude problems, he can be periodically blasted on all points of his body with an array of wall-penetrating electronic frequencies (radar, acoustical, microwave, infrared, etc.), even for long hours at a time. This is an excellent means of raising his body temperature to unholy levels, while simultaneously inflicting extremes of pain. A simple means of ensuring that the misfit knows that he is under nonstop surveillance and had better learn to obey . As to the tiny voice of his conscience (referenced at the conclusion of y our article), what better way to install such a stimulant than by means of the voice-to-skull microwave technologies recently promoted by the Department of Defense as being their V2K or V2S capabilities. When on the street, this evil felon can be followed and taunted by recruited, organized groups of strangers whove been apprised of this way ward creatures psy chological and phy sical peculiarities and sensitivities. (After all, they will need to taunt something.) And while on the job? A felon being employ ed? Not likely . However, if this misbegotten creature should actually presume to find employ ment, then the same ty pes of recruited, organized groups of (co-workers) can continue the taunting while on the job, while also sabotaging his work product, thereby hastening his removal back to the streets. A process that is guaranteed to enforce obedience, if not madness, violence and/or suicide.

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And all very cost-effective, as well. Fifteen-to-twenty percent of our God-fearing population would be more than happy to keep paroled felons on the straight-and-narrow for mere peanuts and a little personal stroking and recognition. What bills need to be paid can be covered by the corporations who need a basis for testing their latest imaging, surveillance and electronic weapons sy stems. What do y ou think, Mr. Wood? Far-fetched? Of course. But, nevertheless, something to consider as being an effective prison without walls.
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enigma44 1 y ear ago

Dear Miss Mckinney , I read y our comments some time ago and had been meaning to respond to them. At first I felt very angry about y our comments, but after reading them a second time, I guessed that it was tongue in cheek. Do y ou know someone who is living this out? I do, and believe me, it is very much in the present.
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caseym54 2 y ears ago

Problem with GPS/cell solutions like ExecTrak (and hundreds of others) is that they need large batteries, frequently recharged. If the felon wants to abscond all they really need to do is "forget" to charge it and in a few day s they 're free to go. The only thing they 'd have to fear is a quick police response to the lack of signal. Not the way to bet.
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Bernecky 2 y ears ago

More from the stone-walls-do-not-a-prison-make file: "Consider a related issue: the clearly illegal subsidies China provides to its clean-energy industry . These subsidies should have led to a formal complaint from American businesses." That's repo man Willy Loman Krugman, in the process of snatching the idea of death panels from the minds of enslaved laborers, leaving them with their original idea: solar panels. http://www.ny times.com/2010/09/13/opinion/13krugman.html?ref=opinion.
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al_frick 1 y ear ago

Prison rates continue to rise even though crime rates drop?????? Am I the only one seeing the correlation between the two? Think Mcfly Think. Bad people locked up = less bad people on the street to commit crimes. This is another pathetic article condoning additional crime. The modern-day "liberal/progressive" is a joke of a human.
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al_frick 1 y ear ago

Prison rates continue to climb while crime rates have decreased? Am I the only one here who see the correlation? Think McFly think. May be just may be, the more cockroaches we lock up, the less violent our streets are. It's one thing to live insulated in some suburban home, untouched by crime, like no doubt y ou are. It's another thing to be on the front lines in some inner city while gangbangers kill each other in front of y ou. This entire article basically boils down to: 1) It costs too much to imprison scum. Erego, we should free them. Heck, if all I had to do was wear a monitoring tracker, I may just murder the author of this inane article to prove a point.
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Guest 1 y ear ago

How about when released they have REAL HOUSING & REAL TRAINING & REAL JOB?
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Mike Luke 1 y ear ago

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its a brilliant step in the process of chipping all people, please wake up
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Mike Luke 1 y ear ago

also why are all these privately owned prisons being built across the US?? is it may be because what we think is our government is actually a registered corporation???? IRS and the Federal Reserve included???? why is it that people still think their "government" is classified as such???
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sciatic nerve pain 7 months ago

Life's not THAT much of a prison....it's what y ou make of it. Life is good, fun, when the ride stops at death...
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