This article is a bit misleading because the bill under consideration is a feasibility study to see if RFID chips can be used in conjunction with GPS technology.
1-20-2009 Washington:
OLYMPIA, Wash. -- Lawmakers are considering a controversial bill that would outfit sex offenders with a surgically-implanted device that tracks their movement.
The devices would replace the ankle bracelets that are currently used to track offenders. The bracelets have been criticized as a lacking device as offenders have successfully removed them in the past before disappearing off of the radar.
"(The devices would) be a little more difficult to take off," said Rep. Maralyn Chase, D-Edmonds.
Chase is among a handful of lawmakers are looking into radio chips that can be planted under the skin. Some of the designs are no larger than a grain of rice.
The radio chips would allow police to track an offender from a sex offender using the same technology used at the Tacoma Narrows bridge toll.
"Right now, we get a postcard at home every few weeks saying we have a sex offender moving into the neighborhood. But unless you know where they live and what they look like how are you going to have protection?" said Chase.
The Department of Corrections admits even with the current devices, officers often lose signal. DOC officials also note that no tracking device can prevent crime.
"It certainly is not prevention. It certainly is not 100-percent," said Anna Aylward with the state DOC.
The bill is currently in committee.
If passed, the bill would allow the state to hire the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs to determine whether chip implants would be more effective.
Similar technology is used to track criminals in the U.K. and school children in Japan. ..News Source.. by Luke Duecy
January 20, 2009
WA- Lawmakers consider implanted chips for tracking sex offenders
November 29, 2008
WV- Cabell County Tests GPS Home Confinement Monitors
11-29-2008 West Virginia:
A pilot project underway in Cabell County lead to a better tracking system for registered sex offenders and other criminals on home confinement.
HUNTINGTON -- Finding the address for a registered sex offender in West Virginia, is as simple as logging onto http://www.wvstatepolice.com.
But knowing the real-time location of a sex offender, may soon be just as easy for home confinement officers. "When they're [sex offenders] away from home, we don't really know where they are, and I think we can do better than that," said Cabell County Circuit Judge Dan O'Hanlon.
O'Hanlon is leading a pilot project to test GPS monitor bracelets for some criminals sentenced to home confinement, especially sex offenders.
"It allows us, as an organization, to better track the criminals and provide a more secure, safer environment," said Alternative Sentencing Director Oscar Adkins.
The home confinement officers attach the hardware to an offender's ankle, then track their electronic footprint through the Secure Alert satellite system and website. The program can also be tailored to each specific case.
"We can put zones of exclusion where there are parks, swimming pools, daycare centers, elementary schools, the home of a victim. And if a person goes anywhere near those, an alarm would be set off," said O'Hanlon.
-But, they cannot be programmed to sound an alarm if the offender enters a child's home everywhere in the United States, GPS does not prevent crime, it will do no more than pinpoint WHERE A PERSON WAS when a crime took place! That is not PREVENTION!
Advocates say it costs less than jail time and allows better security than the traditional home confinement system.
"If you're in jail, somebody is monitoring what you do, what you eat, what you wear, every minute of every day. If you have the privilege of serving your sentence on home confinement, we ought to be able to monitor you just as much as if you are in jail or prison," added Judge O'Hanlon.
Judge O'Hanlon will present a report to the State Supreme Court in six months regarding the success of the GPS pilot project.
If the results are positive, registered sex offenders and other criminals on home confinement could be required to wear the GPS monitors. ..News Source.. by Gina Long
February 19, 2008
Technology keeps eye on sex offenders
2-19-2008 Missouri:
Nobody wants them. But everyone wants to know where they are.
So cities and states are forging new laws and using the latest technologies to keep tabs on hundreds of thousands of convicted sex offenders.
Their home addresses are considered public information. Some wear bracelets that can be tracked by satellite and cell phone towers. Others are forced to give their online identities and screen names to parole officers. Some communities are limiting where offenders can live.
The ability to track them, safety advocates say, is one of the best ways to protect the public. If you know where the bad people are, they say, it's easier to keep an eye on them. Or to avoid them altogether.
Critics, however, say new laws and restrictions make it impossible for sex offenders to be anything more than social outcasts. And there are those who worry about putting so much emphasis on what they characterize as a small piece of the sexual crime problem.
There are a host of online databases — often free to use — that can pinpoint nearby sex offenders. Search by city or ZIP code. Check everyone within a mile of your house.
That's what Courtney McIntyre did two years ago when she was shopping for a house in Collinsville. She found a half dozen sex offenders — including one right down the street from her new home.
"It does bother me. Every time I drive by, I look at his house," said McIntyre, who has three children. And unless her husband is around, she said, "we don't walk down that end of the street."
Registries aren't new. Most are the result of laws passed nationwide after a 7-year-old New Jersey girl, Megan Kanka, was raped and murdered in 1994 by a neighbor who turned out to be a twice-convicted sex offender.
What's changing is the ease of access and the options available. More than 600,000 registered sex offenders can be found in state and national databases, run both by government and private industry. Along with limited details of the crime committed, you can often find mug shots, aerial photos of the offender's residence and maps of the surrounding area.
New Hampshire-based Ektron Inc., which has been working with the Pennsylvania attorney general, is developing a system that would send an e-mail alert whenever an offender has moved into the neighborhood. It would eliminate the need for people to do their own frequent searches, said Ed Rogers, the company's chief operating officer.
Not everyone is a fan, however. While registries have survived legal challenges, some people worry about the impact they have on the sex offenders trying to put their lives back together. No other class of criminal, they argue, is treated with such scrutiny.
"Why don't we have registries of burglars and those who do assaults?" asked Evan Harrington, a professor of psychology at the Chicago School. "Why is it just sex crimes?"
That's one of the things that bothers Ricky Cole, a registered offender who lives in downtown St. Louis. Cole, who was convicted of statutory rape, has been out of prison for three years.
"They need to be investigating why kids are walking around with guns as big as they are," Cole said. "They're worried about the wrong thing."
A STRONGER APPROACH
Studies have shown that sex offenders are less likely than other criminals to get in trouble again. A landmark Justice Department study in 1994 showed that 43 percent of sex offenders were arrested for a new crime — 5.3 percent for another sex offense — within three years of being paroled from prison. The arrest rate of those who were not sex offenders was 68 percent.
Such studies, however, have been called unreliable by safety advocates, who say many sex crimes, particularly incest and child molestation, are never reported to police.
Note: This is not true and if folks goto the study shown above and review the charts you will see that the Justice Department addressed this specific issue in that study.
"It's absolutely necessary for the public to be able to see where the sex offenders live," said Stacie Rumenap, executive director of Stop Child Predators, a nonprofit in Washington. "It's not a punishment. It's a public safety issue."
Her group is part of a growing nationwide movement that says simply knowing the offender's street address isn't enough.
Sparked by the 2005 rape and murder of a 9-year-old Florida girl, many states are taking a more forceful approach, particularly against violent offenders or those who sexually assault children.
A hallmark of Florida's Jessica Lunsford Act is mandatory lifetime GPS tracking after an offender is released from prison. The idea has caught on, with dozens of states enacting similar laws.
Such monitoring costs around $20 a month for each offender. Generally using a mixture of GPS and cellular networks, offenders can be monitored passively or actively. Their movements might be checked only if there is a question about recent travels, or they might be watched constantly by someone at a computer screen.
"They leave a trail of virtual bread crumbs," said Alex Brisbourne, president of KORE Telematics, a company that provides network service for tracking systems.
It's also possible to declare certain areas, or even people, off-limits through the use of virtual fences and personal monitors. Previous victims, for example, could be notified whenever their attacker is nearby, said Daniel Graff-Radford, a vice president with Omnilink Systems, a Georgia company that monitors offenders for 100 agencies in 38 states.
"The victim would get an alert, followed by directions on how to get away," he said.
And in what some characterize as an extreme variation of tracking technology, an Ohio company is promoting a device — which anyone could buy — that would vibrate whenever a bracelet-wearing sex offender comes within 50 yards.
For the American Civil Liberties Union, these registries and tracking plans are little more than a new way to punish men and women who have already paid their debts.
"It's not giving them a chance to have a life after they've done their time," said Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU office in St. Louis. "It opens them up to harm by labeling them and pointing them out to everyone."
There also remain questions about the constitutionality of tracking bracelets, which have yet to receive the same legal stamp of approval given to registries.
"The electronic tracking thing is really new," said Eric Miller, assistant professor of law at St. Louis University. "No one is quite clear about how it's going to play out."
'UNREALISTIC ANSWER'
With so much attention focused on technology and ways to track paroled offenders, some advocates for children say there is a danger the public will let down its guard.
Most children, after all, are abused by family members and trusted friends, said Marci Hamilton, a law professor and author of the upcoming book "Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect its Children."
"It's just an unrealistic answer. It's built on quicksand," Hamilton said. "Just because you know there's a predator down the street, don't think you've identified all of the threats in your neighborhood."
Advocates say another problem is that some laws treat all offenders equally for purposes of registration. Lumping all offenders — from teen lovers to predatory child molesters — into a single group can actually make registries weaker, said Kevin McDonald, chairman of Web Wise Kids, a national organization that teaches children about online safety.
"If they all get thrown in together, the real hard-core sickos are going to get lost in the mix," McDonald said. ..more.. by Tim Barker, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
tbarker@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8350
November 17, 2007
Paradigms of Restraint
2007
Abstract:
Incapacitation of dangerous individuals has conventionally entailed the exercise of physical control over an actual body: the state confines the person in jail. But advances in technology over the past ten years have changed that convention. A variety of new technologies - such as GPS tracking bracelets, biometric scanners, online offender indexes, and DNA databases - now vest the government with the power to control dangerous persons without relying upon any exertion of physical control. The government can engage in constant real-time location tracking, receive remote notification that an individual has ingested alcohol, or electronically zone a person into her home or out of a public park. It can prove conclusively that a particular person wore a hat or took a sip from a discarded soda can, or identify a single face in a 10,000 person crowd. In this day and age, restraint of the dangerous can be as much about keeping a person away from a place as it used to be about locking him up in one.
But whereas physical incapacitation of dangerous persons has always invoked some measure of constitutional scrutiny, virtually no legal constraints circumscribe the use of its technological counterpart. Across legal doctrines, courts erroneously treat physical deprivations as the archetypal “paradigm of restraint,” and thus largely overlook the significant threat to liberty posed by technological measures. Similarly, much scholarly interest has focused on the use of physical incapacitation as a means of regulatory control over, for example, illegal immigrants, pretrial detainees, or the mentally ill. An equivalent degree of notice has been given to the question of information privacy in general society. Yet virtually no attention has been paid to the connection between these two areas.
This Article examines the generally unheeded intersection between two well-documented trends: the state's increasing desire to preventively regulate targeted classes of individuals, and its increasing capacity to use innovative technologies, rather than physical incapacitation, to realize that desire. This Article identifies four loosely grouped emerging technologies of control: DNA databasing, electronic monitoring, electronic indexing, and biometric scanning. It then reviews the legal landscape upon which they operate, and demonstrates that, across the range of doctrines, courts unduly focus upon the physical world as the relevant metric against which all restraints are judged. As a result, technologies of restraint are imposed without necessary procedural safeguards. This Article then outlines four concerns peculiar to the technological nature of these restraints, and illustrates how these significant concerns are wholly overlooked when the physical world is the determinant referent of review. The Article closes by urging greater judicial scrutiny of technological restraints, and by laying out a series of potential inquiries that might aid in such an effort. ..more.. by ERIN MURPHY, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Boalt Hall)
July 19, 2007
Electronic Monitoring: A Select Bibliography
Electronic Monitoring: A Select Bibliography
All material listed below is available at the University of Toronto. Entries in bold type are housed at the Criminology Information Service & Library, Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto and/or available online. Materials are listed in reverse chronological order. ..more.. by Civic Research Institute
May 24, 2007
Electronic Monitoring of Sex Offenders
December 2005:
Background:
The Fifth CBC District Department started the Electronic Monitoring Program with federal funds as a pilot project in Polk County in FY 1988. The General Assembly replaced the expired federal funds with a State General Fund appropriation to the Fifth CBC District Department in FY 1993.
Generally, the electronic monitoring devices were used within the Intermediate Criminal Sanctions Program as defined by Chapter 901B, Code of Iowa. Offenders required to be on electronic monitoring were usually high risk, repeat offenders that were also being supervised according to the policies of the Intensive Supervision Program. This Program requires the offender to have a variety of multiple contacts each week with a Parole/Probation Officer (PPO). Examples of the type of offense for which an offender could be placed on electronic
monitoring include Operating While Intoxicated (OWI) Third Offense, domestic violence, and sex offenses.
Electronic monitoring of offenders in Iowa has been used primarily for enforcement of a curfew (home confinement), as an intermediate sanction for those offenders who failed to comply with the terms of the probation or parole agreement, or to monitor an offender’s alcohol consumption. Electronic monitoring has not been used to track an offender’s location in real time. The Judicial Branch, the Department of Corrections (DOC), and the CBC District Departments do not currently have the capability to provide an immediate response to reports of violation. ..more.. by Department of Corrections
Electronic Monitoring of Sex Offenders: 2006 Report to the Legislature
Abstract:
The monitoring of "high-risk sex offenders who are on supervised release, conditional release, parole, or probation to help ensure that the offenders do not violate their community supervision conditions" is examined. Sections of this report include: background; advantages of global positioning system (GPS); GPS monitoring technology; disadvantages of GPS; type of sex offender subject to monitoring; time period offenders are subject to monitoring; financial costs of monitoring equipment; and summary. Accession Number: 021237 ..more.. by Minnesota Department of Corrections
