Thinking about it….what is the point of the ankle monitor if you can cut it off and have time to disappear? It seems that she could have just been on supervised release without the monitor and escaped equally. The ankle monitor did not seem to do any good, and cutting it off didn’t prevent her escape; or provide any benefit to knowing if she had skipped out
I think I can see the value for ‘unsupervised’ release, where if they cut the monitor off, they will be found out quicker than not being checked on….but for supervised release this ankle monitor failed in providing any benefit.
It’s also not easy to cut those things off. Certainly not something you can just do on an impulse, and poor impulse control is probably behind a large fraction of crime.
It’s also not really to keep them from disappearing - they aren’t easy to remove, but it’s not impossible. It’s much more useful to monitor their compliance with other conditions of their supervised release. For example, staying away from a particular location ( such as the victim’s home , employment or school) or abiding by a curfew. After all, whoever is supervising the releasee isn’t with the person 24/7.
Its been a full day. She’s gotten as far away if she was supervised in the group home without the monitor. If she didn’t have the monitor, she could have walked out and been noticed missing by now. But with the monitor, she cut it off and is missing for just as long as she would have been if she was in the group home without it.
The monitor didn’t seem to provide enough deterrent to prevent escape, nor did it give quick enough notification for her to be quickly stopped. It failed. There is no difference in the situation if she didn’t have the monitor on in the first place and was just in the supervised group home.
It is a good solution to minor crimes. Guy is sent home with an ankle monitor, can’t leave his house more than 50 meters. He is on monitored house arrest. Cheaper than keeping him in jail. And who pays for the monitor? the guy stuck wearing it pays for it. Not cheap, like a car with an alcohol blow-to-start device. Not simple or cheap to use. But it is cheaper for the county, nicer for the offender.
No, I’m suggesting that people who are given ankle monitors are not in locked facilities. If she was given an ankle monitor, that suggests that she was relatively free to come and go - people in prisons or locked psych wards don’t get ankle monitors. Perhaps she could only leave the group home for work/school/therapy , but she wasn’t locked in there 24/7.
It may not be obvious to people who aren’t in the business- but the difference between supervised and unsupervised release isn’t that one person is in a facilty staffed 24/7 that they never leave and the other one has parole/probation officer or similar title monitoring them. " Supervised release" means someone is monitoring them and “unsupervised release” means no one is monitoring. If the supervised/unsupervised release is in the context of parole or probabtion ( which it appears this is since the monitor came from the Department of Corrections) then the only way the person will be found to be in violation of unsupervised release is if they come to the attention of the police or the court- nobody is making sure they are home during particular times , or looking for work , or not using illegal drugs.
Depends on the group home- as you may have guessed , I spent my career in “community supervision” and there were absolutely group homes where the residents were permitted to be out on passes except during their scheduled therapy times.
You’re a minor criminal. You’ve been sentenced to wear an ankle monitor at all times and to remain in your house when you don’t have approval to go out.
You’re thinking about robbing a convenience store. If you do it while you’re wearing the ankle monitor, it will show that you were present at the crime scene. If you cut off the monitor, you’re committing a crime by doing that. Either way, you go back into jail. So you decide you can’t rob the store.
If you weren’t wearing the monitor, you’d probably figure you were safe to sneak out of your house and go rob the store, because there wouldn’t be any electronic record of your movement. Even if you became a suspect, you could claim that you were home the whole time.
You would expect a well-run county supervision program to have geo-fences around where the monitor is allowed to be, tracking for monitor cut off, and/or monitor strangely stationary, and most of all, real live humans who receive, and promptly act on, any alerts from the system when a monitor is violating the fencing and other limits.
When the county doesn’t bother having anyone monitor the alerts, the effectiveness plummets. But that’s a human / staffing / funding problem. Not a technological problem. Any agency that can’t afford, or doesn’t care enough, to supervise the output of the ankle monitor system sure as hell doesn’t have the resources or give-a-shit to assign a live human minder to follow each of their charges around 24/7/365.
How many people are currently wearing an ankle monitor? What percent of them cut off an ankle monitor? How many who do are caught within 24 hours? What percentage of those who are caught are sent to jail and not eligible for future supervised release? What happens to people who cut off an ankle monitor and commit other crimes while loose?
Easy answers to most of those questions are not easily findable. From various comments seen during search I assume that the number of ankle monitors has to be in six figures, minimum. The percentage cut off has to be quite small, otherwise individual cases wouldn’t get so much attention. Being captured normally means a return to jail. Committing crimes result in additional years of sentencing.
That the system is not perfect is not a reason for demanding that the system be eliminated. I’d postulate that the use of ankle monitors ranks somewhere in the low hundreds of things that need to be reformed in the US prison ecosystem.
Being outraged by this one failure misunderstands the way society works. I’d liken it to the outrage caused by the very few deaths caused by self-driving cars while the same people ignore the 40,000 deaths caused by drivers. Imagine if that could be lessened by 99%! But that would still cause 40 deaths per year. I’d bet that each one would still trigger outraged overreactions.
And this overreaction is instituted by a person who has not yet caused any further harm. What would be the reaction if she were not wearing an ankle monitor? Damning the system for its failure to not use one?
In my state (Wisconsin) it currently costs about $65K/year to keep someone in prison. That includes the minimum security facilities where each day trusted low risk inmates get into a prison van (driven by a trusted inmate) to go to work at jobsites, where part of their wages go to paying off their court ordered restitution. And reliably return to their prisons 99+% of the time at the end of the work day without detouring to a tavern. The vast majority of outliers who run off get quickly caught, and do another 5-10 years for it, even some who had only a few months remaining on their incarceration. Big bucks spent all around.
So as a taxpayer I’m all for using ankle monitors for selected crimes by selected felons. Especially since the long term outcomes from the program shows a greater decrease in future offense risk with these folks than those who spent more time in prison. Prison’s a great place to learn tips on how to get away with it next time.