Let’s imagine in a hypothetical world that a government makes an offer to all people currently serving time in prison. You can either:
a) Complete your sentence as you are already doing.
b) Be released but have a GPS tracking device attached to your leg which will monitor your position day and night.
How feasible is this to pull off? Two clear obstacles would be cost and technical limitations. Are there any GPS devices sensitive enough to provide a signal during daily life, i.e. indoors, riding the subway etc. and if so how much do they compare price-wise with keeping someone in prison?
The GPS data would need to be stored for some length of time (say 6 months) so if a crime is reported the police can check if any tagged person was at those co-ordinates at the time of the crime.
I have not worked in this field in over two years, and technology improves dramatically in our world, so my information may be old. Further, they do have ankle tracking devices for “house arrest”, but I know nothing about the technology.
Using a small GPS device to track bikes during The Tour De France and The Tour of California, we allowed interested people to track their favorite teams via a web site.
I will speak about different aspects of the problem.
Knowing where you are.
This uses a GPS device to determine your position. At any one time we would be reading a signal from up to 11 satellites and determining the position from there. The more satellites you can “see” the better for accuracy. However, even when our signal fell to 6 satellites we still were OK. I had been told that we only needed 3, but I saw our devices fall out if we were seeing less than 6.
This seems to require a bit of power though. For instance, my GPS runner’s watch will stay powered for only a day, sometimes as much as two. If I run this morning, leave it on all day, I might get another run in tomorrow - but I’ll as likely get a “low battery” warning and it will turn itself off. I have something like this, although mine is a lower-end model.
Reporting back where you are.
This can be done via a SIM or a satellite connection. The SIM is cheaper, but we saw large sections of California in which we could not get a signal to broadcast. Also, cheaper is relative. You still must pay for a phone plan.
The satellite seemed better, but the cost to use was horrendous.
The devices were difficult to keep powered up. We had to charge them every night.
Keeping the data is no problem. We had each device broadcast it’s position every 15 seconds and tracked 40 bikes over the course of a tour. The database had a few million records after a tour and the disk space cost was very low. You could easily broadcast much fewer details.
Some notes:
We were looking for the lowest-cost devices we could find. Maybe the higher end ones would behave better.
There are ankle-bracelets used for house arrest that allow for tracking. I know nothing at all about them, not their cost, not their GPS reception abilities, not their power consumption, nor their broadcast abilities.
Criminals are locked up for the general public’s safety, not because criminals need to be tracked while interacting with the public. This would not work to keep the public safe.
We’re closer to the point where this is literally true–not a bad thing. Overcrowded prisons, but no shortage of criminals, most of whom DO NOT need to be segregated from society for society’s sake. Non-violent criminals would be massively inconvenienced, with the public no less safe, if their punishment were to take the form of surrender many of their civil liberties for a fixed period of time. Monitoring them, for example, to make sure they go to work, phone in regularly (like every few hours) to the prison system, stay for certain hours in their apartments, which are under surveillance to see that they are not luxury-filled suites but instead not any better than a prison-cell would be–this could work.
And obviously it wouldn’t work as a blanket offer to ALL criminals now housed in prison, but only to select candidates, with the threat of a return to “real” prison at the first violation of terms. With the sentence extended.
They actually will do this on a very limited scale with bail. I worked at a temp agency and they sent me to a bail bond’s office, and they told me some non-violent people awaiting trial, had a tracking device on them, in addition to bond, as a condition of their bail. We didn’t use this at our agency but other agencies do.
When I asked why, it was a combination of, too costly and too easy to fool.
So it does exist, but I don’t know if it’s too easy to fool or not
This is done regularly in Sweden, but I think people prefer prison and I understand them. Being locked up for a couple of months seems preferable to walking around in your everyday surroundings, but being excluded from the social life.
It’s getting closer. I looked into such a system to track my dog. Now, there are hunting collars and such that will transmit to a receiver carried by the hunter. But what we are talking about are systems wherein you can track it/he/she from anywhere.
The systems I have seen, use GPS to fix there location and then transmit that over a cell signal. Mobil Phones. It is then processed and you can see the location of the device on a web site. Within a few hundred yards, Not that good. Yet. And it was not triangulation from cell towers. This was using Satellites.
Anyway, my experience was such that if you don’t have excellent cell coverage, it’s just not quite there.
I have no intention of ever facing the choice. But if I had to, I would much rather spend the time in my own house where I could at least be part of my family and contribute to it.
and remember that politicians have to approve such an idea. They will be the ones taking the heat if one of these criminals commits a crime while out on surveillance. And imagine that crime being a violent one. It would look bad and would look like the politicans were coddling criminals. What do they gain?
The Atlantic had an article about the rise of such programs a couple of months ago: “Prison Without Walls” by Graeme Wood. There has in fact been a rise in using GPS devices to track (some) prisoners, and the technology is described as being quite sophisticated in the degree to which it can keep track of what the parolees or probationers are doing:
Wikipedia states that the cost of incarceration per inmate in the US is around $62 per day which adds up to one heck of a lot of money given the large numbers of inmates. I’m fairly certain that cost-wise a GPS system would work it’s just a question of accuracy, if such a device existed that could reliably track an offender it would be a useful tool in deterring criminals from committing a violent act or robbery whilst being monitored as they would be certain of being caught. Of course it wouldn’t help against crimes such as tax evasion but these are less worrisome to the public.
My question really focuses on the reliability of such systems rather than ‘is this a good idea’ hence it being in GQ. From my experience with GPS, which is limited to car sat nav, they lose signal very quickly when in tunnels but I thought there might be more expensive versions reserved for military applications that can track people in buildings.
I think that was a Twilight Zone episode. In futuristic society where everyone is under total surveillance a man is sentenced to be made “invisible” for a set time. “Invisible” meaning that a special mark is placed on his head and everyone else is required by law (& enforced by the surveillance bots) to completely ignore him and pretend he doesn’t exist (to the point where he can’t even get first aid after a car accident).
I’m confused…
How would monitoring work if you are inside a building?
Doesn’t GPS require open sky and direct line of sight from the device’s antenna to the satellite?
This is the crux of my query, there are companies like this one that claim:
I’m wondering if they work well enough to provide reliable tracking of a person as they go about their day-to-day lives. The idea of applying it to criminals is just an idea of an application really.
You can use a combination of other sensors (accelerometer, compass, etc) to track movement once out of GPS coverage. I’m not sure how accurate you can be, and for how long.