Building Prisons Without Walls Using GPS Devices 545
Hugh Pickens writes "Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic that increasingly GPS devices are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that 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,' writes Wood. But new devices such as ExacuTrack suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might do 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,' adds Wood. 'The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.'"
Already used in the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
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Might have something to do with the facts that:
1. Criminals aren't tagged at the time of release, but sometime later.
2. The tags are handled by private companies, not the government.
It's like there was a competition, "How badly can we screw this up?", and everyone tried their hardest.
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That news article is from five years ago, it would be interesting to read something a bit more recent. I can't find anything from a reliable source though.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, neither does incarceration. ;-)
In the US, particularly here in California, the prison industry and unions have a disproportionate influence on the workings of the criminal justice system.
The way I see it, the only way a GPS-based system would be implemented as anything but a pilot program would if there were huge amounts of money to be made. If saving money was the issue, we could reduce crime, costs, and prison populations starting tomorrow simply by writing each offenders a monthly check for a portion of their incarceration cost. Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
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Apparently, neither does incarceration. ;-)
Well it does for the period that they are incarcerated.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, that does tend to happen when you put all of the brutal murderous rapists in close proximity.
If you have some objection to it, then feel free to rehabilitate them at your house. Just let me know where you live so I can move to a safe distance.
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Being "hard on crime" causes crime. If drugs and prostitution were legal, regulated, and taxed everywhere in the USA, then the taxes would go down by a large amount. Over 50% of prisons are filled with people convic
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The way I see it, the only way a GPS-based system would be implemented as anything but a pilot program would if there were huge amounts of money to be made. If saving money was the issue, we could reduce crime, costs, and prison populations starting tomorrow simply by writing each offenders a monthly check for a portion of their incarceration cost. Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
Heck, you could go a few steps further and implement proper educational and so
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Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
Why not? There are so many laws on file now that we're all criminals to some extent without knowing it. The majority of people in prison are the ones who got caught and couldn't afford a lawyer.
The sad fact about prison is that the people who really deserve to be there (the socio-paths etc) tend to influence the non-socio paths into socio-paths so when they get out of prison they already have contacts on the outside to go com
Re:Only killing works (Score:5, Interesting)
> It is a sad fact that the ONLY rehabilitation that works
> on criminals is a bullet through the brain. Not a single
> other system has any noticable effect.
Well, not entirely true. Getting people out of the environments that lead them towards a criminal lifestyle tends to be pretty effective (aside from the seriously mentally ill, of course).
Prison, unfortunately, is the exact opposite of doing that.
A bullet through the brain, on the other hand, gets points for a cheap and effective after-the-fact approach.
Re:Only killing works (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, "criminal" is a flexible label easily attached to anyone... even you.
Re:Experiences in Denmark say otherwise ... (Score:5, Informative)
Not just Denmark.
GP is just exaggerating, probably to reinforce his personal world-view.
Hit up google for recidivism and rehabilitation and you'll find papers like this one [jrank.org] that show non-punitive rehabilitation programs can achieve a 25% reduction in recidivism.
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That's old style tags (with no GPS to track where you go during the day), and if you'll read your own article ... it explains most of the fail is by the people who are supposed to administer the tags (but don't do a very good job).
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I can't see this being worse than the existing system under any scenario. In the existing system you automatically go to prison. In the new system you only end up prison if a whole chain of events go wrong.
* Obviously the "automated" justice won't be administered by ED 209 robots.
* All data uploaded obviously needs to be digitally signed by the device to prevent forgery or mistaken ID.
* The device could beep a warning if you're outside your allowed limits. eg. If your car breaks down it might beep and you g
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
Arguably, given the article you posted, it doesn't appear to be effective in the way it was presented, but I found a few points interesting.
This person gives no references for the statement claiming 'it doesn't work', nor does he compare it to the current incarceration method statistics and he doesn't present any statistics from typical prison based incarceration. He of course only speaks to and ask about the worst case scenarios (those that managed to get out of their collars, those that these private companies failed to monitor, or those that didn't get them in the first place), which of course gives him worse statistics than expected.
Last point that I noticed, the article said the companies could not supply him with any studies indicating that tagging was effective. The point being that they simply don't know if it's effective as no studies have been done to date, or they aren't aware of any. You interpreted that as "it doesn't work".
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like a great story for an SF movie, too bad it was done before, back in 1987:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/
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Almost the same, except for the whole TV game show bit.
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This is a lot more like Rutger Hauer's Wedlock (1991) [imdb.com]
They even had the enforcement in place - using explosive charges...
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. I rather dislike seeing IMDB links for this reason. Why not link to the Wikipedia page for the film, or even simply say "the Running man", and hyperlink that to IMDB? It's much more courteous to the reader. Wikipedia links have the benefit of being nearly as easy to search for as IMDB movie links yet still being human-readable.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
Only as long as convicts aren't forced to sign a waiver stating they won't sue if the device malfunctions and zaps them by accident.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow I seriously doubt it would be "less than 1 in a 1000000" that got "zapped" wrongfully. Underpaid, bitter and plain nasty remote operators would most likely love the excuse to "zap" a convict. Add to this that there will most likely be some sort of manual "zap" capability as well and you're more likely to see random convicts getting "zapped" simply as a way to amuse the operators...
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You're so sure technology cannot be polished and that everything's going to fail, then why risk driving a car?
I didn't say the tech would fail. Also, I don't drive.
why risk going on a bus? the under paid bitter driver might smash into a wall for fun.
Well, considering that most humans have some basic sense of self-preservation and the newspapers aren't exactly filled with reports of crazed bus drivers driving into walls for shits and giggles, I think I'll be fine.
Or why eat out? the underpaid bitter waiter might poo in your food for entertainment.
I rarely eat at restaurants. However, I do occasionally order pizza but I am friendly with the guys who run the local pizza place and I doubt it would be in their best interest to defecate on the food since they want repeat customers. It is
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you're weird. It sounds to me like you have an issue with authority in general, as you immediately suspect that operators would gladly abuse their power to zap convicted felons.
Many, many psychological experiments have shown this to be the case. In fact, some of them are among the most famous psychology experiments that have ever been conducted. Perhaps you should look them up?
The "zapping" is particularly relevant here, as we have seen how Tasers have been massively abused by police forces. Non-lethal weapons in general appear to encourage abuse.
Nobody agrees that people should be beaten by the cops for no reason.
Yet it happens every day, every hour, every minute.
The police kill innocent people much less often than criminals kill innocent people.
Now, that's a completely different thing. When a cop kills somebody it usually comes with a pretty serious investigation. That's why non-lethal weapons are so popular among sadists. It enables them to get their kicks without being punished themselves. It's too easy for police to claim that they had to restrain or Taser somebody. It's a lot harder to claim that you needed to kill them.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Informative)
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Milgram isn't really applicable to this situation. Milgram documents that normal people are willing to perform torture *when ordered to do so by authority figures*, even when doing so causes obvious emotional distress to themselves. The discussion is about whether normal people are willing to perform torture *in violation of the rules*.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds to me like you have an issue with authority in general, as you immediately suspect that operators would gladly abuse their power
Actually, it's pretty much guaranteed. If there is ever a proposal to increase the authority one human has over another, the first question should be:
How will/can this authority be abused?
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Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop crying "liberal!" it's making you look seriously retarded. When you were young, did your dad bang on about how communists are trying to take down the US? It's pathetic.
Anyway, the people you are decrying are people who simply spotted a serious and counter-productive way this new suggestion could be misused, and pointed that out. So I guess in your mind "liberal" == "someone who's paying attention".
It must suck to be you. Seriously.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you by any chance edit for conservapedia?
Cause that's the only place I've ever seen anyone else throw around the term "liberal" in such a wierd manner or blame everything bad with the world on liberals.
Someone called you out on a absurd figure of 1 in 100000.
five 9's reliability for a system that is expected to opperate outside a controlled environment is wishful thinking at best and self delusion at worst.
Have you even thought about how such a system might opperate?
if this thing is based on GPS or radio then you have the problem that you have to deal with the signals actually getting to the device.
there are 2 situations you have to deal with.
1: Someone who while wearing one of these devices wraps it in tinfoil and goes to mexico.
2: Someone who while wearing one of these devices walks down into his basement or as part of a job (gainful employment is good isn't it) has to carry stuff into a metal shipping container or for any reason at all legitimately ends up either underground or inside a metal cage.
In both cases you completely loose all signals too and from the device.
So what should the device do in such a situation?
Do you have it administer a crippling shock to them when the device loses signal?
Well you've going to have a hell of a lot of nasty car accidents in tunnels.
The more time you give them the more time they have to get over a border or to get somewhere where the device can be safely removed.
If widely used you can be sure a black market would spring up for removing these things.
Want to go across town and kill/rob/rape someone? find some legit reason to be inside a metal cage or anywhere else where elecromagnetic signals are blocked, wrap it in tinfoil and be sure to remove the tinfoil at the spot you were in when you put it on.
And if it's GPS based it'll lose track of you anywhere inside.
If it's based on positioning with cell phone towers then anywhere with no cellphone signal is good.
And you dismiss offhand the idea that the system opperators will go sadistic yet that's a real posibility.
the stanford prison experiment was a lovely illistration that power really does corrupt, put normal nice people in a position of power over others and many of them will, in a short time, become sadistic and cruel.
If prisoners getting shocked happens a lot then pretty soon people stop paying attention to the logs and after that people would start doing it for shits and giggles.
I'm all for technology but I can spot a poor idea when I see it.
this tech would probably be fine for really low level offenders, kids who shoplift, petty criminals or white collar criminals you simply want to track reasonably but if that's your goal then quietly making a deal with the cellphone companies to get the positions of their phones would be almost as effective (especially if they don't know you're doing it and as such they don't know to leave their phones at home).
For any significantly dangerous person this system is useless no matter how big a capacitor you stick in it.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
The device would have to unremovable (which requires sensitive anti-tamper cabling through it, with power on those cables), it would have to be able to do real time crypto (both for transmitting data, and for being able to answer to challenges, otherwise its messages could be replayed by a ground-based antenna while you wrap the original device in metal), it would have to be able to transmit over a fair distance, and perhaps through walls, and it would have to be able to 'sting' - presumably using electricity, and it would require a portable power-source to do all this.
And then you haven't dealt with the risk of 'no reception', or answered the question of 'where are we going to do location - by triangulation or GPS inside the device ?'.
I can tell you now, from experience, using current-day technology - that's not going to be a very 'portable' device.
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The main problem is that when the offender walks off, no one reacts. In theory, police should be dispatched and nab him -- but that never happens. Not even "rarely", it's for all practical purposes "never". This makes the system just a costly joke.
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I didn't know that. Is that true? How do you know? (Are you a police officer or something?)
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
Let the liberal, hippies castrate this until it won't "scar" the delicate souls of the inmates, limiting it to such a stupidity and rendering it completely incompetent -
Actually, you are much more likely to run into opposition from the prison-industrial complex, & they ain't liberal, but let's not let facts or common sense get in the way of a good rant.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Your arguments would be more persuasive if they didn't immediately resort to inane labeling of anyone who might take issue with them. It's the rhetorical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "I can't hear you because you're a liberal hippie!" Labeling the opposition is a cheap and lazy way to avoid addressing what they have to say.
(For what it's worth, I am not a hippie and most decidedly not a liberal.)
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
imagine something that would deal an extremely painful, incapacitating electric shock whenever one steps out of his allowed boundary.
I can imagine that abducting people with such devices would become a popular sport.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone goes to prison and stays there, the objective of stopping them from committing more offences is met for the duration of the imprisonment. The objective of punishing the person is also met. The objective of getting them back to a useful role in society is up to the offender.
If someone gets a portable GPS+torture bracelet as punishment, I don't see how the rest of the community is spared from the risk of immediate reprisals or further offences.
On top of that, it actually opens the door to vigilante-type initiatives. The neighbourhood watch (or the opposing gang) finds that someone is carrying the bracelet, take him on a van and just watch as he gets zapped by remote control. Not fun.
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If someone goes to prison and stays there, the objective of stopping them from committing more offences is met for the duration of the imprisonment. The objective of punishing the person is also met. The objective of getting them back to a useful role in society is up to the offender.
I agree with most of what you said, but the part quoted above throws me for a loop. For anyone sent to jail for a period that is less than half of their remaining life expectancy (as a somewhat arbitrary place to draw the line), that third objective seems to be the most valuable for society. Let's say a healthy 35-year-old is imprisoned for 5 years for some non-violent crime, for example. If I had to pick only one of those objectives to be fulfilled (with no other concerns like cost, possibility of failu
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I guess the question is whether rehabilitation is even a reasonable objective in many cases? I think that sometimes the answer is yes, and if you can turn somebody around it certainly is a win/win. This should be pursued.
However, I see the main purpose of prison as deterrence. If there were no negative consequences for committing crimes, there would be a lot more criminals out there. If prison were a nice place to be, then perhaps more people would opt for prison as a lifestyle. As a result, prison HAS
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
Prisons may not be perfect, but they are the best solution we have yet come up with.
Yup, "yet". But maybe this is the time where we actually do come up with something better. It doesn't make sense to slap a bracelet on a mentally deranged serial killer, tell him "watch it, cause we're watching you" and send him back onto the street. But doing the same with a shoplifter might actually be better than putting him behind bars for a while, having him loose contact with the real world. He may not be able to to any harm while in prison, but when he gets out, chances are he's not thinking "wow, that really taught me something. I'll never do it again."
To quote George Jung in Blow [imdb.com]:
"Danbury wasn't a prison, it was a crime school. I got in with a Bachelor of marihuana, I got out with a Doctorate in cocaine."
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
As a not-liberal not-hippie I think I would prefer prison.
Not only could your devices go wrong by triggering early, they could also go wrong by not triggering at all, or by being temporarily removed (which happens a lot in the UK). I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
All of which have been ironically enabled by misguided "prison reforms", and are apparently now considered an inevitable consequence of prison, which apparently also "inevitably" makes people worse. I cannot understand why it is now considered impossible to keep order within a fucking prison. A hundred years ago our ancestors had no trouble keeping absolute control of prisoners.
It's like the basic idea of prison has been forgotten. We put the bad guys in prison so that the rest of us don't have to live in a prison. We subject the criminals to authoritarianism so that the rest of us can live in freedom. Why is this hard to understand?
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Then I'd ask why prison isn't working that way now, when it once did work exactly that way. What has changed? Why can't prison work that way?
Nobody should be raped in prison. There should be no gangs in prison. There should be no contraband in prison.
I mentioned liberalism because HateBreeder did. I think he really means "progressivism". And progressive attitudes to prison have certainly brought reforms. Some of these have been good, but others have simply given more freedom to people who shouldn't have any
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I talked to one of those criminals that was in the work release program. He said that a large portion of his salary was being given to the prison system. I do not know exactly what portion, but was led to believe that it was more then half. Isn't this heading toward a system of slave labor.
I can understand the point of paying for your sins. However if the system is set up so that it is being fed by those sins will naturally accumulate w/o regard to reality. Cops generally acknowledge that if they pull y
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Heading towards? Heck, man, it was *designed* that way. Check out the 13th amendment:
Doesn't get any more straight-forward and basic than being specified in pl
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
How about a compromise? A touchy-feely hippie ultra-authoritarian regime that prevents rape, gang fights, and drug dealing while providing education and therapy.
There's a big overlap between bad guys, people with emotional/psychological problems, and people who have horrible lives with no opportunities for betterment. While we're locking up the bad guys, we might want to try to make them less bad.
Also, let's lock up fewer guys. Legalize drugs, do away with mandatory sentencing. Save prison time for violent offenders.
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A touchy-feely hippie ultra-authoritarian regime that prevents rape, gang fights, and drug dealing while providing education and therapy.
Yeah, I sort of wish I could go to Cuba, too... :-/
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Liberal hippies?
I'm more worried about this from a libertarian perspective. Once the cost of "imprisoning" someone is low enough, then its a lot easier to increase sentences and criminalize a lot more stuff.
"It seems you're missing a tail light... the penalty for that is being tagged for 20 years."
Even as expensive as prisons are now, the US has almost 2.5 million people imprisoned. Make it cheap and how long will it be before anyone busted for possession of weed in their early 20's has to to be tagged until they're well into their 40s?
It wouldn't take too long before you'd have a sizable underclass which would have no rights, but still be able to do various manual labour jobs. It wouldn't very much different than slavery.
Yes prisons are expensive, but in a way thats a good thing. That means there is a cost to making all sorts of stupid laws that everyone is in violation of sometime in their lives. Or have you never smoked a joint, pirated a song, attended an anti-government demonstration, or drove over the speed limit?
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The USA has 0.75% of it's population in prison (and growing)
These people are often used as cheap labour in prisons
Prisons are generally considered unmanageable, contraband of all types is freely available and discipline is poor at best
When was slavery abolished in the US ?
Why stop at "prison"? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the future, everyone will have to carry a GPS, not just "prisoners," and you won't be allowed in Beverly Hills without an appointment.
Re:Why stop at "prison"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although this sounds like it will help with a few of the issues that are faced with managing the criminal population, I don't see any way of preventing it's eventual use to control society as a whole. Though if history has taught us anything it's that the eventual measures of control which are used will be more insidious than we could imagine from looking at this technology now.
Well... (Score:2)
...I can imagine there is plenty that could go wrong here, but at the same time there is plenty that can go right. I think it would take a good bit of time to really do a list comparison to weigh the full pros and cons of such a move.
Why not just embed everyone with GPS at birth (Score:4, Insightful)
That way if they do something wrong it will be easier to prove and the "incarceration" can be switched on remotely. Add an integrated taser and you've got the ultimate means of population control.
Maybe the problem is the laws are fucked up??? Maybe their incarcerating for things that should be a summary offense? Maybe there are too many laws?
The people in 1984 had it easy.
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That way if they do something wrong it will be easier to prove and the "incarceration" can be switched on remotely. Add an integrated taser and you've got the ultimate means of population control.
Save this comment .... I have a feeling that sometime not to far in the future it could be "prior art".
Prisons are fail. GPS is fail, too (Score:2)
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So? There are a shit-ton of prisoners who are absolutely no danger to others when they go in, but may get de-habilitated by the prison experience.
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Violent offenders would still be locked up.
(Obviously, I thought... why do geeks have to be so "all or nothing"?)
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(Obviously, I thought... why do geeks have to be so "all or nothing"?)
'Cause it's binary.
Well, sometimes it's hexadecimal, but in this case binary...definitely binary.
Track all prisoners - and their friends & fami (Score:3, Interesting)
In order for this to work properly, the surveillance must keep an eye on the prisoners. But humans are group animals - prisoners outside a prison will have contact with innocent citizens. So, logically, surveillance will be forced to keep an eye on everybody.
Checking whether they show up at work at the right time, and leave at the right time can be automated.
But how to check what a "prisoner" does in its free time? How to make sure they don't engage in other illegal activities? You must keep an eye on the surroundings, and all the people who are in contact with the convict.
I conclude that this plan has the potential to be the biggest privacy failure in history.
The prisoners win, the system wins, but the innocent bystanders who never do something wrong will have to fear that the nation-wide surveillance will be massively extended. (But hey, they got nothing to hide, right?)
But everybody will break the law at some point... and with such a huge surveillance, soon the government will own everybody. Ok, ok, I might exaggerate a bit... but this is no development to applaud for.
Suddenly... (Score:2)
Also, iirc the effective precision of GPS is sometimes limited? What happens when someone's not trying to flee but the system think he is?
Love the idea. (Score:2)
Oh, I see they have it in a sort of "geek gadget" shop [portmeiriononline.co.uk] too...
Didn't work for the Running Man! (Score:2)
Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:5, Insightful)
Roughly 25% [commondreams.org] of people in prison are there for non-violent drug offenses.
We could implement this GPS plan and fund a nice chunk of corporate socialism for the industry around it.
Or we could get the stick out of our ass, end the war on drugs and start making our deeds better match our words about being the most free country on the planet and in the process shave 25% of the taxpayers' prison bill - maybe even more considering how much violent crime is derivative of the drug trade.
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:4, Insightful)
While I'm at it, I'd like to point out that more people die of drug overdoses from legal prescription drugs [hhs.gov] than do from illegal drugs like cocaine, heroin, meth (~8700 vs 10K-13K in 2005 a steadily increasing trend for the decade beforehand while the rate of illegal ODs stayed roughly flat).
If the war on drugs is about stopping people from hurting themselves and the people who depend on them, then what fuck are we doing?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The statistics are skewed. The amount of people who take illegal drugs is not equal to the amount of people who take legal drugs - therefore there's no link.
Similarly, the amount of people who die every year driving cars is less than the amount of people who die every year from jumping off the leaning tower of pisa with bombs strapped to them while wearing large pink hats. Therefore jumping off towers with bombs wearing pink hats is safer. QED.
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Is more than*
Sorry
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I think you need to factor in that those taking illegal drugs are taking drugs that have been tampered with by every lowlife imaginable, bathtub meth, heroin that can be really high-grade or practically worthless and so on. Those taking prescription drugs are taking professionally manufactured and tested drugs in doses recommended by their physicians who most likely have a lot of education and experience when it comes to prescribing drugs.
Now, I'm not saying everyone should run out and do heroin or meth, ju
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:4, Insightful)
No they're not, the poster and the article talk about total drug deaths, there is no underlying assumption of equality in the size of the populations.
The article referenced is also focused on the trend : a rapidly increasing number of deaths from prescription drug overdoses, which presages a significant problem in the years to come.
To use your example, and using the numbers in Jah-Wren's post, its as if 8700 people died from car crashes and 10-13K people jumped off the tower wearing a pink hat, and the 10-13K is increasing rapidly year-on-year. That's a pink-hat-and-tower problem, regardless of how you slice your statistics.
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Sounds nice, but when 1/4th of the prison population turns up in neighborhoods across America with their tell
-tale "I took/take drugs" GPS collar, anklet they might find it a little bit hard to find a job, and they could easily find themselves treated as a new social leper, joining the registered sex offenders who have to live a certain distance from schools, playgrounds, etc (to protect the children). So, once you have turned out 25% of the prison population and branded them unemployable, how will they liv
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:4, Insightful)
Drug users poison themselves, and I find very few possession charges of "individual use" quantities of drugs that carry mandatory prison time... Drug dealing poisons not only the dealer, but also the community, and almost always carries mandatory prison time - as it should.
What? How the hell is growing a plant and selling its dried flowers "poisoning" anyone? Caffeine has killed more people than marijuana has (which is ZERO.) That's not even to mention its numerous medicinal properties. So tell me, when an A student at an engineering college gets busted for growing a few plants in his closet because some Stasi-style snitch (i.e. neighbor vs neighbor, family vs. family, set up and controlled by the police) ratted him out, and now he's a felon and can't vote or even get a damn job, is that just and fair? Is that the system you want to see continued? Is it because you can't stand the idea of a person deciding to live differently than you, or is it simply because you (like 90% of non drug users) are completely and proudly ignorant as to what the whole thing is even all about? Try smoking a joint some time, see what happens, then get back to me about how just and holy you still think it is for non violent, otherwise non-criminal drug users to be imprisoned, fined, and branded for their "crimes."
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:5, Insightful)
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What a crock of shit. Let's see:
Drugs are bad and make people do bad things.
You should be free to do drugs, but you should be liable for your actions.
Of course you should be liable for your actions. So when you smoke a big ass bowl of Skunk and clean out your buddy's fridge, you owe him some Cheetos, man.
What the fuck "bad things" do you think are caused by drugs? And how many of these "bad things" are a result of drug usage, as opposed to drug prohibition? Do you think a meth junky is going to rob near as
I don't think it'll work (Score:2)
Prison is both a deterrant and a way of stopping people from activly doing bad things.
But if I'm dealing drugs (for example), tracking me won't make much of a difference, I'll still be able to do my thing.
Similarly, nothing's there to stop me stealing from shops or whatever.
Also where's the punishment in this?
Re:I don't think it'll work (Score:5, Informative)
The main thing is that prison is the absolute best way western societies have to turn Mr. "Sold a little bit of weed to his friends" into Mr. "Stabbed some dudes in the neck in a bar" or Mr. "Habitual burglar". Prisons have an unwavering ability to turn non-violent offenders into more violent ones, which are then released into society. You asking "where's the punishment" would make sense if prison worked perfectly from society's point of view. It doesn't. The first question that should be asked is how we can make prison into the deterrent it should be, while at the same time ensuring that society doesn't lose a great chunk of its money-making public into violent offenders.
The punishment is that your schedule is controlled 100% by the prison. Yes, you could steal from shops or sell drugs, but as you can be placed at the scene rather easily, and would be sent back to prison for any infraction, I doubt anyone would do it. The same goes for selling drugs.
A cell with one cellmate is... (Score:5, Insightful)
... often far safer than "open time" in the quad, and yes, I write from experience.
Its too cheap (Score:2, Insightful)
Everyone breaks some laws in modern life. It can be as simple as speeding to not filling a form out correctly.
This makes "jail" cheap enough for everyone. Also I suspect over time it would evolve into something like what released sex offenders have to deal with. At least prisoners get food and medical care.
Just put a collar on some one, tell them they are not allowed to go anywhere over 5 miles away. And not to a list of prohibited places and let them go... Who will hire them?
How will they eat. What ab
Coverage? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
This seems doubtful (Score:2)
There have been numerous reports of how our GPS-tracked parolees have violated parole and their overburdened parole officers have simply not been able to pursue the matter. While I'm not necessarily a fan of prisons and throwing people in one for every little infraction, it seems like replacing one failed strategy with another that we can reasonably predict will also fail is just foolish.
Perhaps we need to figure out a way to make the GPS solution work before we start to use it.
Or perhaps we need to figure
The No (Score:2)
The City of Fresno built a park downtown, and installed power outlets for people to plug their laptops into, etc.
Turns out these shady-looking guys started meeting there every day. Some people started noticing, and then noticed they had their ankle bracelets plugged into the outlets. Who were they? A bunch of child molesters.
The city turned off the outlets soon after that.
But where did these guys go, then? They needed to charge their anklets, after all.
The very helpful Fresno PD threw a long extension cable
Failed Prisons? (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA claims that prisons have failed. I don't entirely agree. The way I see it, prisons have three roles: one is reeducation, when we release someone from prison, they should come out as better citizens, not better criminals. In that respect, you could say that prisons have failed.
The second role of prisons however is punishment: prison SHOULD be an unpleasant experience for someone who has committed a crime. It should be a deterrent, something they will never want to experience again. Also, if you're a victim of a crime, you want to know that the criminal actually gets punished and doesn't get off with just a slap on the wrist.
Finally, the third role of prisons is protecting society, taking dangerous individuals out of the loop for a considerable amount of time so that they can't do any harm.
It seems to me that while GPS tracking devices may help somewhat with role 1, they don't do anything for role 2 and 3. So in my opinion, they shouldn't be a replacement for a prison system, but an addition to it, for instance in combination with the parole system.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
prison SHOULD be an unpleasant experience for someone who has committed a crime.
Thing is, most of the really nasty people don't have too bad of a time in prison. The people who really suffer are the minor offenders who end up as Bubba's bitch (and Bubba quite enjoys breaking in his bitches, making them suffer helps him relieve the boredom and he gets free sex whenever he wants it).
Games without frontiers (Score:4, Interesting)
Why go to all that effort of targeting criminals? You could do like what the UK has done, install CCTV EVERYWHERE and make the entire country a virtual prison.
Speaking from my experience, it feels nice to get out of the UK on holiday. However, due to the number of cameras and them being everywhere everywhere, the UK really does feel like one large open prison when you return. So much for being a free country.
It's a social not a technological problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a notion. Why not try to figure out what is wrong with your society that causes so much crime and then deal with it. Then you won't have to put so many people in prison. The U.S. is the land of the free, yet it has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Surely someone must be asking, "Hey, why is that?"
If you make fun of tinfoil hat wearers (Score:2)
Be aware that there's now a 50% chance they could be a convict thwarting GPS instead of a nutcase thwarting the government.
Yeah, let's not blame bad laws where it starts (Score:5, Insightful)
"War on Drugs" anyone? They eventually backed down from prohibition of alcohol, so why not other substances? There is a lot of stuff that should be legal and no point in going into a discussion about it. We have even more laws that need repealing as well such as those associated with prostitution and other activities. These aren't "nice" things to do and I probably wouldn't engage in any of them, but I don't think they should be illegal either. People are going to trash their lives no matter what laws are written. The impact on society that turning them into felons has is fewer voters and a lot more bus boys and career criminals. (No one will hire a felon for a good job. Not ever.)
Fix the laws, there will be fewer criminals.
Sorry , you're wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Drugs such as opium and heroin WERE legal but they caused so much misery and strife that they were banned in almost all nations. People who thing legalising drugs will somehow make addicts and the problems they cause vanish are living in a dream world. Perhaps you might like to check out the number of deaths either through violence , drunk driving or liver disease from alcohol - that well known legal drug.
Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental problem is not the how-prisons-work part. The real problem is the putting-people-in-the-system part.
Reducing the cost of removing people's freedom will not solve the problem, it will incentivize it and increase it. Just like (a) computers didn't create paperless offices, and (b) increased efficiency didn't lead to reduced work hours, and (c) tasers didn't lead to a reduction police abuse, and (d) helmets don't reduce motorcycle accident rates, and (e) unmanned killer drones don't reduce the length of our wars.
Instead, I propose: re-writing drug laws and incarcerating a fraction of the people we do now.
Potentially (Very) Bad Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Where it works this may be good in the short run, but I see a couple of potential (and sinister) downsides:
1) It makes punishment much more acceptable. I'm not so worried about the deterrent value, but the fact that you might get put under surveillance for unpaid library fines, downloading the wrong file, etc. This yet another slippery slide into a police state.
2) It makes surveillance much more acceptable, and helps fine tune the technology for it. If it turns out that criminals who do not misbehave live perfectly happy lives under the system, and if it is demonstrated that crime goes down when more people are under such surveillance, the "nanny state" types might be pushing for more people to be tagged like this. The typical "if you're doing nothing wrong, why wouldn't want this?" "think of the children" "terrorism, etc." arguments might be advanced by some and swallowed whole by the increasingly surveillance-desensitized public.
2.5) It may make law enforcement lazy, causing them to push for more of this technology (cheaper, more effective, etc). You can draw an analogy with the convenience of warrant-less wiretapping
I'm not sure what the full answer is, but more surveillance (even if it's just for the criminals -- for now --) gives me a very uneasy feeling....
Re: (Score:2)
and also points to "new recycling centers, printing facilities and industrial laundry rooms." The Nation [thenation.com] seems to think BP is paying prisoners to clean up oil damage, and theres always number-plate production. You should note that
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
What about using prison labour to provide cheap goods and services?
This is already done, but it's a terrible idea. Prisoners, who are working very cheaply, compete with free people who are working for a reasonable wage, distorting market prices. Maintaining the supply of cheap goods requires maintaining the supply of prisoners, giving the state an incentive to create more laws that poor people will routinely break so that they can be put to work at below the market rate.
You already have this system in the USA. You also have the highest proportion of your population incarcerated of any country.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not the violent felons who make up the bulk of the prison population. Making non-violent felons into violent ones, on the other hand, is a substantial problem with our current "justice" system.
Re:Clearly, the author (Score:4, Informative)
Restorative Justice [eveningnews24.co.uk]
Also google "Restorative Justice"
100% -- is that so? (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound very confident, do you have a source for that "near-100%" statistic?
I'm asking because in my opinion this "sex offenders / serious violent offenders always do it again" myth has been debunked quite thoroughly. Rape and homicide especially are not repeated very often -- recidivism percentages are in the 1-10% bracket for the typical 3-5 year data period. Harris&Hanson calculated that in 15 years 3 out of 4 sex offenders have not been rearrested -- this is a very good figure compared to just about any other form of crime. See "Predicting Relapse" by Hanson and Bussiere (collects data from 61 international studies), or the half a dozen DoJ studies on recidivism for starters. There are some sub-types of sexual offences that seem to be more prone to repeating (and I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for homicide) but that wasn't your point, was it?
Another widely popular myth is visible in your "Homie da Gangsta gang-rape" idea. Most sexual assaults (80-90%) are committed by someone known to the victim (you can find this in DoJ statistics as well, can't remember the exact ref).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Otherwise one could come across a Canadian without ever realizing it. Many look and sound like normal people.
Are you sure you've really met someone from Canada before?
Re:having done time myself....... (Score:4, Informative)
The quick math shows that's almost 10k per prisoner per year in California. Consider that California seems to be an extreme outlier, I only cited their numbers because of their large prison population, with the Justice Department's most recent (2001 sadly) data [usdoj.gov] showing
A few articles point to the hidden costs of GPS - the significant increase in workload for local police forces being primarily responsible - the lack of actual real-time monitoring, the fact that serious crimes have been committed whilst the offender was being tracked using GPS, and the legal and ethic questions raised.
So have at it oh learned ones.
Re:Yeah, Right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that isn't how this has worked out historically. Non-violent offenders are not generally housed today with violent offenders anyway, so this would have no effect. What is highly likely is that problem prisoners that are difficult to manage within a prison environment get pushed out the door with monitoring so they are no longer a problem.
The immediate effect is that we are once again pushing mentally disturbed folks out on the street. In the 1970s we closed the hospitals and pushed the peo
Parent the only poster to get it (Score:3, Interesting)
The U.S. is rapidly becoming a two-tier society in terms of civil rights because of our desire to lock everyone up and the reality of being unable to do so (most of this is driven by the war and drugs and the secondary lawlessness caused by drugs).
First-tier citizens are those who have never been convicted of a felony.
Second-tier citizens are those who have been convicted of a felony and are either on long-term probation or parole or have served a long sentence. In most cases, these people lose most of the