The practice of electronically monitoring offenders has grown in recent years as the technology has matured and governments have gained familiarity with it.
Electronic monitoring offers some advantages over incarceration, but governments should also be aware of its limitations, law enforcement experts say.
Authorities use electronic monitoring to keep tabs on offenders who are under house arrest, in pretrial release or on parole. In some cases, electronic methods are used to monitor offenders’ movements within a prison complex. Another application is monitoring sex offenders after their release from prison. The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which President Bush signed into law July 2006, empowers the Justice Department to award grants to help state and local governments outfit sex offenders with electronic monitoring units.
Monitoring began in the mid-1980s with radio frequency identification systems that tracked an offender’s location. Such systems require offenders to wear an anklet fitted with an RFID transponder. The RFID anklet sends signals to an in-home monitoring unit. The unit is attached to phone lines to keep authorities aware of whether the offender is at home. If the offender is not within range of the receiver at the appropriate time, his/her absence is reported via the phone line to a computer that correction officials monitor.
RFID receivers used in electronic monitoring — at least in the case of BI, a company that helped pioneer electronic monitoring — use a standard RJ-11 phone jack. Starting in the late 1990s, monitoring vendors began to offer solutions that use Global Positioning System technology. This approach tracks offenders as they travel beyond their homes.
On the GPS side, improvements in digital cellular networks and greater GPS sensitivity have helped boost its use in managing offenders. Fewer than 2,000 offenders in the United States were monitored via GPS in 2000, said Jim Buck, senior product manager at BI. But now authorities use GPS to monitor as many as 12,000 to 16,000 offenders, Buck said. Nationwide, about 125,000 offenders are monitored electronically through GPS, RFID or a combination of the two.
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