An Interesting Ploy ... But What Good Will It Do?

I'm not particularly opposed to the idea of tracking parolees electronically, but I find myself wondering just what the point really is.

"Corrections officers can monitor exactly the whereabouts of an offender at any given moment – these are very precise, satellite-driven devices," Day said in Halifax as he held up one of the black, circular gadgets.

"It makes the job of the correctional officer more efficient."

The devices use Global Positioning System technology to report parolee movements to a monitoring network that streams data on a regular, but not real-time, basis

Okay, in a perfect world, you can tell approximately where someone is. Of course, any such system is going to be somewhat error-prone. I don't share Stockwell Day's confidence in the technology - Satellite systems are surprisingly brittle, and easily disrupted by something as simple as the weather; and that doesn't even begin to open the can of worms around the fact that someone who wants to can come up with all sorts of ways to disrupt them.

But critics panned the initiative, saying the technology is flawed and prone to being abused by crafty parolees who can outsmart the devices by cutting them off, disabling them or, as one is reported to have done, fool officials by strapping it onto a pet cat.

Just to be clear, the device has to be removable for a number of basic reasons - safety and hygiene among the top of the list. You can't just clamp one of these to someone's leg and tell them never to take it off. (Anyone who has ever worn a tensor bandage or cast for any length of time can tell you just how bad that can get if you can't clean the area regularly.

Even if I presume that most parolees would just wear the thing, I find myself puzzled by just what this system will prove. At best, it might make it easier to detect occasions where someone violates 'no go' restrictions in their parole order. There's a limited amount of utility to that.

One of the questions that we have to consider is the costs of maintaining such a system. Consider a parolee with an order to stay 50M away from playgrounds. Even if you have a handful of playgrounds within a 10Km radius of where the parolee is living, there's a lot of geographic detail that has to maintained in the database to detect when a violation has occurred. (To be truly meaningful, I suspect that one needs the geometry of the park recorded in the database) The costs of maintaining the database, as well as the rules engine required to describe the various restrictions being imposed, is going to be quite high - especially once you have more than a handful of cases being tracked.

The other thing that does worry me is this little tidbit:

...but that officials at a monitoring centre in the United States are quickly alerted to any breaches and follow a protocol to determine whether police are dispatched.

With the often dramatic differences in Canadian and US laws - and the related complexity, I wonder about having monitoring centers that are run by US companies. There are also concerns around the data being shared across the border. The American government has laws on the books that give them access to the contents of any server on American soil, and that raises serious questions about both the confidentiality of data and privacy violations.