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Two San Antonio Schools Implement Mandatory GPS

Two schools in San Antonio, John Jay High and Anson Jones Middle School are forcing all students to carry a student card that is linked to a GPS tracking device during school hours. Apparently students who refuse to carry the card are being denied privileges such as attending homecoming events.  Reports have also surfaced of school administrators making threats to take more serious punitive action. Motivation for the GPS system seems largely financial as funding formulas reward increasing class attendance. However, some parents and local activists have opposed the cards and demonstrated outside the school.

While this is not the usual type of electronic monitoring we discuss on this site, this has serious implications for the potential to extend various types of monitoring to new target groups. Not surprisingly both John Jay and Anson Jones are more than 80% Latino.

To read more on this story visit:  http://www.scdigest.com/ontarget/12-10-10-3.php?cid=6299

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South Carolina man gets five years in prison for not charging his monitor!!

This from the Newberry (South Carolina) Observer on September 10, 2012:

A Whitmire man was sentenced to time in general sessions court last week after not charging his electronic monitoring system.

Joe Nathan Neal, 42, of 1935 Drayton St., Newberry, pleaded guilty to willful violation of terms of electronic motoring.

He reportedly failed to charge his monitoring system after being told to do so by S.C. Probation, Pardon and Pardon agents.

Neal was sentenced to serve five years in prison for the offense.

If you don’t believe it, here is the link:

http://www.newberryobserver.com/view/full_story/20062456/article-Man-sentenced-in-electronic-monitoring-case?

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An ankle bracelet is not tres chic

In this article, “Get Out of Jail Unfree,”  William Saletan  notes that only the rich seem to get out on bail with electronic monitoring while the poor languish awaiting their fate. He says ankle bracelets have become tres chic, a sign of status.

He has a point. Sure Lindsay Lohan, Martha Stewart and Charley Sheen have worn the bracelet.  But Saletan also misses the point. A large number of people on monitoring are poor folks being monitored for no good reason. For many it is an addition onto a parole regime. Others get a monitor for driving without a license. Some juveniles (mostly African-Americans and Latinos)  are even getting monitors for excessive truancy.

And most of these people are being made to pay user fees-typically $5-15 a day, sometimes more. If you don’t pay you might end up back in jail, even if you don’t have a job.

Most of this has little to do with public safety. Ultimately, public safety is about encouraging people to live peacefully with one another. Stringent regimes of electronic monitoring do not do this. They limit peoples’ opportunity, confine them to the house, and promote frustration and failure. Nearly everyone would rather be on a leg monitor than in jail or prison, but we need to set the conditions of electronic monitoring so they facilitate rehabilitation and re-entry, not transfer the punishment of the jail cell to our living rooms and kitchens.

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Welcome to Voice of the Monitored

Welcome to Voice of the Monitored, a website dedicated to waking people up to the realities of electronic monitoring in the US criminal justice system. Every day about 200,000 people face their day wearing an ankle bracelet. But with prison overcrowding and rising state budget deficits, those numbers will grow. Electronic monitoring is the wave of the future. It’s time for everyone to find out more about this-to make sure it doesn’t become a technological ball and chain. Here’s some links to begin to help you to know what’s up:

Link to the web page of Robert Gable, inventor of electronic monitoring who wanted it to be used as a way to send positive information, not increase surveillance and control. Read about how he feels betrayed by the way monitoring is used today:

http://rgable.wordpress.com/electronic-monitoring-of-criminal-offenders/

Is electronic monitoring an alternative to incarceration or a technological ball and chain?

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

Is the rise of electronic monitoring the result of the failure of our prison system? Graeme Wood of The Atlantic magazine thinks so. Read his story here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/prison-without-walls/308195/

Read the story of big money in electronic monitoring: the $372 million contract BI Incorporated, now owned by private prisons firm the GEO group, signed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to supervise 27,000 immigrants awaiting court decisions.

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2010/03/16/who-profits-ices-electronic-monitoring-anklets-0

Should high school students with records of truancy be put on electronic monitors? Some schools in Dallas think so. Read about it at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/education/12dallas.html

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