Articles Concerning Sex Offender Issues ©
Articles Concerning Sex Offender Issues © |
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"They are told they need to stay away from schools and parks. So the officer goes into our software and sets exclusion zones around those areas," he said. The small, blue, waterproof device straps to an offender's ankle and tracks their movements using GPS technology. "They get near that park and, ultimately, they cross that invisible fence. It immediately sends an alarm to the monitoring center, and within a matter of a minute or two, the monitoring center is now on the line with them — live," Olshen said. [[[snip]]] Olshen said they have tried to make the device tamper-proof. It has a heavy duty plastic strap with steel bands and a fiber-optic line inside that sends an alert to the monitoring center if it is messed with. An offender can be tracked to within 50 meters, but the technology does have its limits. "You do run into the limitation of the 'urban canyons.' You're in downtown New York and you're limited in the ability to see three satellites to get a location," Derrick said. He said it makes it difficult to track, but not impossible. Olshen cautions that TrackerPAL cannot stop someone determined to commit a crime. "There is no silver bullet. But that's not the majority. The majority are the people who comply," he said. ..more.. : by Ben Winslow
King, who has been in the office less than two weeks, first proposed using the GPS devices when he was running for election last year. It's part of a package of changes he will recommend to lawmakers who meet Tuesday for a 60-day session. [snip] King also will seek money from the Legislature -- $150,000 the first year and $75,000 annually after that -- to give treatment providers training in therapies for sexually abusive juveniles. [snip] King's office estimates the GPS pilot project could involve as many as 300 parolees and could cost up to $600,000 annually. Parolees would pay for the GPS devices, but some state money also would be required. King said using the devices would be cheaper than having parolees re-offend and get sent to prison again, and would protect children from sexual predators. ..more.. : by Deborah Baker
"We tried to narrow it down so we're spending resources on the worst of the worst," said Rep. Jim Watson (R-Jacksonville), a sponsor of the legislation. Watson said the state's current monitoring programs tell officials whether the sexual predator is "in the box or out of the box, but it won't tell you where they're at," he said. "If they leave, all we know right now is they're not where they're supposed to be." Real-time tracking: All sex offenders wear electronic monitoring devices, which tell parole officers when the person has left his or her home. But the GPS devices inform corrections officials of the offender's location in real time, said Derek Schnapp, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections. Statewide, there are 1,200 sex offenders on parole. Fewer than two-thirds are classified as sexual predators, said Derek Schnapp, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections. The cost of GPS is higher than other monitoring devices because correction officials have to monitor the data they receive. The new system costs about $10 a day, compared with $6.85 a day for more traditional monitoring, Schnapp said. The state has allotted $2.8 million in federal funds toward the program for this fiscal year, said Gerardo Cardenas, a spokesman for Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The state is already starting the program among the current parole population, he said. ..more.. : by Crystal Yednak
North Dakota's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation already uses Global Positioning System monitoring to keep track of high-risk sex offenders. A bill under consideration in the state Senate would expand the option to other jurisdictions and other types of offenders, including county jail inmates. [snip] The bill would cost an estimated $360,525 over two years. Offenders on the system might be required to pay fees. Right now, high-risk sex offenders who are being monitored must pay $10 daily, Emmer said. ..more.. : by BLAKE NICHOLSON
In some cases, offenders have been released from prison and put on a monitoring system, then committed crimes again. In the past two years in the U.S., a young girl was accosted in one case, a woman was shot and killed in another and a South Carolina woman was raped in yet another case - all by suspects under surveillance. [SNIP explanation of cases mentioned] 'Numerous flaws' Robert Kulhavy served one-third of a 60-year prison sentence for manslaughter before he was released in November by the South Dakota Board of Pardons and Paroles. He was charged in 1985 with the rape and killing of Brenda Schmidt of St. Helena, Neb. But the GPS tracking system Kulhavy and others wear has "numerous flaws," said outgoing state Sen. Clarence Kooistra, R-Garretson. "Just giving him a monitor will give the community a false sense of security," Kooistra said. [snip] "In terms of accountability, at least the offender knows if they go in this area, someone is going to know," Johnson said. "It's still a people-to-people business. It's just a tool." ..more.. : by Monica LaBelle
..more.. : by National Institute of Corrections
When you rely on vendors to tell you how their product works you never get the full story and they won’t advertise their weaknesses and sometimes emphasize their strengths,” said George Drake, Deputy Director for the Probation and Parole Division, New Mexico Department of Corrections. “It helped us figure out what really works and to see it from an objective perspective.” [snip] New Mexico Testing Project Reveals Pros and Cons: As part of the RULETC study, which was dubbed the Post-Incarceration Active Remote Offender Location Evaluation [PAROLE], New Mexico officials wanted to look at both active GPS, which tracks offenders in real time and provides notification if an offender has strayed beyond allowable areas, and passive GPS, which provides offender location data once the device is connected to a phone line terminal or port. The researchers from EKU set out to test four commercially available GPS devices in two different New Mexico environments – Albuquerque –which is more urban, and a rural community. According to project staff, the site selection was important because sex offenders would be from both area types and the cellular phone structure needed for many GPS systems would be different in each area. “With the technology, it relies on a cellular network to report the data. To transmit the location data [of the offender] it has to reply on a cellular network tower. If you didn’t have a cellular tower, then the data couldn’t be reported,” said Depp. What the research team found was that the cellular networks were not sufficient in the rural area to support an active GPS that officials could “poll” at any time for information. When these connections were not available, the active systems essentially worked as passive ones, downloading information once the offender places the device it is phone system dock. [snip] Identifying Challenges to GPS Systems: According to Joe Russo, Program Manager – Corrections, National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center in Denver, community corrections officials see two main issues that need to be addressed with GPS – the ability to “continuously” monitor and what to do with the volumes of information the systems provide. According to Russo, current GPS-based systems have significant limitations when it comes to continuously monitoring offenders. “The most obvious limitation is that these systems cannot track offenders when they move indoors, underground or anywhere else the satellite system can’t ‘see’ them,” said Russo. “By some estimates, offenders, like most people, spend 85 to 90 percent of their time indoors, so there is a considerable gap here.” The second issue with GPS systems relates to the amount of information that is generated, and unused. Russo said typically, a supervising officer will set up exclusion and/or inclusion zones for each offender based on the case management plan. That means that the officer will only receive an alert if the offender deviates from the approved location or if there is some indication that the offender is trying to tamper with, remove or otherwise counteract the device. Existing GPS tracking systems are designed to be exception-based so as not to overwhelm the supervising officer, he said. What happens is a large amount of information is not being used or shared by the corrections agency or any other agency. “There is a tremendous amount of data generated that could be very useful in the management of the offender that is not being used because the officer doesn’t have the time to manually ‘connect the dots,’” Russo added. ..more.. : by Michelle Gaseau
Finkelhor said there is no connection between a rise in sex crimes against children and the upsurge in GPS legislation. “I’m not a fan of what’s going on,” said Finkelhor. “I feel likes it’s been rather slapdash social policy without any real attempt to (determine) what is needed and what works.” In fact, sex crimes against children have declined in recent years despite misperceptions created by high-profile cases like those of Jessica Lunsford – a 9-year-old Florida girl who was raped and murdered by a sex offender who had served 10 years in prison before being paroled in 1980. [snip] If passed, Proposition 83 would allow lawmakers to impose GPS tracking devices on the state’s 90,000 registered sex offenders, a move that could cost multi-millions, estimates the California Secretary of State. California convicts about 8,000 people of felony sex offenses annually. When released, they could also be subjected to the GPS devices – which can cost up to $10 a day. Excluding the costs associated with higher personnel to maintain the system, rental of the GPS systems alone could cost up to $29 million annually. Political opponents of the initiative question the plan’s financial feasibility. “It’s just not good public policy,” said Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, chairman of the public safety committee for the California State Assembly which heard testimony on the GPS plan last year. “When you ask the governor – who is the sponsor of this [Prop. 83] – how he’s going to pay for it when the state is already $6 billion in debt…he just says, ‘You can’t put a price tag on the safety of children,’” Leno said. ..more.. : by Jenna Colley
The sex offender GPS law signed by the governor last year calls for using the technology only on serious sex offenders who have served time for multiple assaults on children. Melissa Robers, director of the Department of Corrections’ sex offender, says she sees GPS as a useful but costly tool that parole officers and police can use along with polygraph tests to prevent sex offenders from repeating their crimes. She says the GPS will tell officials where somebody is, but it won’t say what they’re doing when they’re there, something for which the polygraph is helpful. The DOC estimates it could cost as much as $10,000 a year per offender to implement GPS tracking, but Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, says California, Michigan and North Carolina have all implemented programs for much less than that. Suder says the DOC estimates are way off and “completely over-inflated.” He believes they are trying to pad their budget through this program and “playing games” to try to get some additional staff and resources. ..more.. : by Gil Halsted, Wisconsin Public Radio
Roy's parole officer discovered Wednesday that the GPS monitor had been tampered with and called police who later found the monitor at U.S. Highway 85 and Atrium. ..more.. : by Denver Channel
The California measure makes no distinction between habitual offenders at high risk of striking again, worth having their every move tracked electronically once they're out of prison, and the felons who have served their time and present no apparent threat to public safety in the eyes of the court. Just put a GPS device on all of them, voters said, forever. Now, the state's government and the courts are puzzling out how to bring the voters' sweeping mandate to life. The broad California measure is symptomatic of a national tide of fear about sexual predators lurking in the bushes by the playground, at the mall, just on the other side of the elementary school fence, and skulking about on MySpace. A sort of boogeyman come to life, sex predators even have their own gotcha TV reality show masquerading as a news program, Dateline's "To Catch a Predator." Every state in the nation now has a sex offender registry, tracking where offenders live. But Virginia, for one, is taking the fight to cyberspace, considering legislation to have offenders register their e-mail addresses and instant-messenger handles, so the Internet can be cleaned up, too. ..more.. : by Katharine Mieszkowski
Sibbett and his partner Robin Riggs, who worked as legal counsel in former Gov. Mike Leavitt's administration, wrote the language and pushed the product to Hatch and his staffers. "TrackerPAL is to my knowledge the only company that can meet those minimum standards," Sibbett said. The bill creates a pilot program providing states with grants, but the money can only be spent on ankle monitors that meet the legislation's requirements. And according to the suit, that means TrackerPAL. The bill appropriates $15 million over the next three years but also creates a path to increase the size of the program. [snip] This bill, pushed by Hatch in the Senate and former Florida Rep. Mark Foley, among others, in the House, created a national sex offender registry and called for police to equip the worst sex offenders with an ankle monitor. The bill included "a single-source provision that only the TrackerPAL device can satisfy," according to the lawsuit. Before it was passed, Sibbett and Riggs say they recruited some high-profile supporters. Ed Smart held up the TrackerPAL in one appearance, Hatch in the other. A picture from "America's Most Wanted" now appears on Hatch's Web site with the caption: "Hatch is holding an example of the ankle tracking device that will be attached to the worst of the worst convicted offenders." ..more.. : by Matt Canham, The Salt Lake Tribune |
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