[Ppnews] Zimmerman Joins Elite Club: The Rise of Electronic Monitoring in Criminal Justice

[Political Prisoner News]

April 30, 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/30/the-rise-of-electronic-monitoring-in-criminal-justice/

Zimmerman Joins Elite Club:
The Rise of Electronic Monitoring in Criminal Justice

by JAMES KILGORE

Last week George Zimmerman joined an elite circle that includes 
Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Martha Stewart, and Dominique 
Strauss-Kahn-media figures  who owe their freedom to electronic 
monitoring.  For the rich and famous (as well as those who can raise 
$200,000 online) electronic monitoring, or more precisely, house 
arrest with an ankle bracelet means liberation from the vagaries of 
life with the ordinary folk behind bars. First used in U.S. courts in 
1983 electronic monitoring  is currently going viral in the criminal 
justice system. While in the early days, radio frequency technology 
dominated, most current systems are GPS-based,  allowing near real 
time tracking.

Originally what practitioners often call "EM" applied primarily to 
people guilty of petty crimes or those` with sex offenses.  But today 
prison overcrowding and state budget crises have made electronic 
monitoring an alternative of choice.   On a normal day some 200,000 
people wake up with a black plastic box strapped to their leg and the 
number is growing. In the past week alone, San Francisco County 
announced plans to triple the number of people on EM while 
legislators in Louisiana, which has the nation's highest per capita 
incarceration rate, considered  initiatives to put legions of people 
onto the streets using the electronic tether.

On one level all this EM is a good thing.  For more than three 
decades we've been locking people up at a furious rate. Our prison 
and jail population has quintupled since 1980, now standing around 
2.3 million. Electronic monitoring does offer opportunities for 
people other than the rich and famous to avoid being behind bars. 
Currently, the most common application of electronic monitoring is 
pre-trial release.  Every day individuals awaiting judgment on 
relatively minor offenses go about their daily business on an ankle 
bracelet as a condition of bail. Cook County in Illinois has already 
run 250,000 people through electronic monitoring regimes, 85% of them 
pre-trial. This is a step in the right direction-trying to ensure 
that a minor brush with the law doesn't cost a person their job, 
their housing, or access to medical treatment and education.  But at 
the same time, there are concerns about how the use of this 
technology will evolve.  It all gets a little more complicated when 
we move beyond the Zimmermans and other lesser lights awaiting trial.

At the root of the complexity is the reality that electronic 
monitoring is not only a policy device, but  an industry.  Not 
surprisingly the biggest force in the world of EM is also one of the 
giants of the private prisons sector, the GEO Group. This 
Florida-based firm pulled in earnings of just over $1.6 billion in 
2011.  Early last year GEO took over the EM sector's largest 
player,  BI Incorporated of Colorado.  BI is both a producer of the 
devices and a provider of backup services, including direct 
monitoring of individuals on ankle bracelets through a network of 
community-based offices.  BI controls some 30% of the U.S. EM market.

GEO's investment in BI dovetails neatly with the company's  most 
rapidly expanding market niche: immigration detention. While private 
providers only hold 8% of prison beds nationwide, in immigration the 
figure is 49%.  The advent of harsher immigration laws and the 
increasing implementation of Secure Communities promises even bigger 
profits for private sector liberty deprivers. For those captured by 
the immigration dragnet but not put behind bars, BI has the perfect 
solution- intensive supervision. In a $372 million contract signed 
with ICE in 2009, BI agreed to "intensively supervise" 27,000 people 
awaiting litigation for deportation or political asylum.  For most of 
these 27,000 that intensive supervision will include a BI ankle bracelet.

The introduction of this technology into the immigration sphere 
raises questions of who's next.    If the GEO Group and other major 
players in the electronic monitoring sector such as Omnilink, iSecure 
Trac, Secure Alert, and Pro  Tech  are to maintain their bottom 
lines, they need to expand their revenue either by tethering more 
ankles,  lobbying  for longer terms for those who are under EM, or 
increasing service charges.

The obvious first target is growing the use of GPS monitoring as a 
condition of parole or probation. Currently, there are nearly five 
million people in the U.S. under some form of post-conviction 
supervision. Less than 50,000 are on electronic monitoring.  While 
there is little evidence that EM reduces recidivism, expect the 
private providers, led by BI, to use an army of lobbyists  to pitch 
their product with a heavy dose of the gospel of ensuring public 
safety and the need for tighter restrictions  for those on GPS systems.

A second untapped market niche is school pupils  In Texas a number of 
high schools with primarily African American and Latino student 
bodies are placing pupils with records of excessive truancy on ankle 
bracelets. In Dallas' Bryan Adams High School, local EM provider 
iISecureTrac kicked in $26,000 to fund a pilot program.  The 
principal was a former employee of the Bureau of Prisons.

In terms of service charges, many existing EM programs have already 
initiated user fees on bracelet wearers of $5 to $15 a day plus 
startup charges which run as high as $200. Denver even has a website 
where people can pay their EM user fees online.  Such miniscule 
tariffs don't pose a problem for the Martha Stewarts and Paris 
Hiltons of the EM realm, but for the generally impoverished 
population that ends up in jail relatively small amounts can break the bank.

So while EM has brought relief to George Zimmerman and other perhaps 
more deserving folk, the real question is:  where is this technology 
heading?  Here are two voices that offer some answers.  John Hastings 
III, President of Secure Alert,  put forward  this summary of his 
firm's direction:

"We will continue to focus our energies and efforts in delivering 
profitable revenue growth, while supporting customer-specific public 
safety initiatives through the innovation and deployment of our 
best-in-class, intervention and real-time monitoring technologies and 
services."

Slate reporter William Saletan offered a slightly different take:

"As GPS gets cheaper, politicians will be tempted to order it not 
just for people who would otherwise be jailed, but for those who wouldn't."

No matter which of these voices you're listening to, if your history 
includes mental health problems, receiving state assistance, 
seriously overdue student loan repayments or getting  caught smoking 
in the high school bathroom-watch your ankle.

James Kilgore is a Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies 
at the University of Illinois. He is the author of three novels, We 
Are All Zimbabweans Now, Freedom Never Rests and Prudence Couldn't 
Swim, all written during his six and a half years of incarceration. 
He also spent a year on an electronic monitor. He can be reached at 
waazn1 at gmail.com




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