[Itpolicy-np] Prison Without Walls

[Bipin Gautam]

(Source : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/prison-without-walls/8195/
)

Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure. But what
if the prisons could be turned inside out, with convicts released into
society under constant electronic surveillance? Radical though it may
seem, early experiments suggest that such a science-fiction scenario
might cut crime, reduce costs, and even prove more just.
...

Unlike most of ExacuTrack’s clientele, of course, I wore my device by
choice and only briefly, to find out how it felt and how people
reacted to it. By contrast, a real sex offender—or any of a variety of
other lawbreakers, including killers, check bouncers, thieves, and
drug users—might wear the unit or one like it for years, or even
decades. He (and the offender is generally a “he”) would wear it all
day and all night, into the shower and under the sheets—perhaps with
an AC adapter cord snaking out into a wall socket for charging. The
device would enable the monitoring company to follow his every move,
from home to work to the store, and, in consultation with a parole or
probation officer, to keep him away from kindergartens, playgrounds,
Jonas Brothers concerts, and other places where kids congregate.
Should he decide to snip off the anklet (the band is rubber, and would
succumb easily to pruning shears), a severed cable would alert the
company that he had tampered with the unit, and absent a very good
excuse he would likely be sent back to prison. Little wonder that the
law-enforcement officer who installed my ExacuTrack noted that he was
doing me a favor by unboxing a fresh unit: over their lifetimes, many
of the trackers become encrusted with the filth and dead skin of
previous bearers, some of whom are infected with prison plagues such
as herpes or hepatitis. Officers clean the units and replace the
straps between users, but I strongly preferred not to have anything
rubbing against my ankle that had spent years rubbing against someone
else’s.

Increasingly, GPS devices such as the one I wore are looking like an
appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes
ever clearer that, in the United States at least, traditional prison
has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. By almost any
metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars
has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace.
According to a recent Pew report, 2.3 million Americans are currently
incarcerated—enough people to fill the city of Houston. Since 1983,
the number of inmates has more than tripled and the total cost of
corrections has jumped sixfold, from $10.4 billion to $68.7 billion.
In California, the cost per inmate has kept pace with the cost of an
Ivy League education, at just shy of $50,000 a year.

This might make some sense if crime rates had also tripled. But they
haven’t: rather, even as crime has fallen, the sentences served by
criminals have grown, thanks in large part to mandatory minimums and
draconian three-strikes rules—politically popular measures that have
shown little deterrent effect but have left the prison system
overflowing with inmates. The vogue for incarceration might also make
sense if the prisons repaid society’s investment by releasing reformed
inmates who behaved better than before they were locked up. But that
isn’t the case either: half of those released are back in prison
within three years. Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro
of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that
the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under
harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be “scared
straight,” is actively counterproductive. Such conditions—and U.S.
prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male
inmates facing sexual assault—typically harden criminals, making them
more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up
today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money
merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few
years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in.

Devices such as the ExacuTrack, along with other advances in both the
ways we monitor criminals and the ways we punish them for their
transgressions, suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might
turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial
number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of
guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant
surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any
deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. The
potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save
billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far
better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than
more-ruthless lawbreakers. The ultimate result could be lower crime
rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the
bargain.

Moreover, such a change would in fact be less radical than it might at
first appear. An underappreciated fact of our penitentiary system is
that of all Americans “serving time” at any given moment, only a third
are actually behind bars. The rest—some 5 million of them—are
circulating among the free on conditional supervised release either as
parolees, who are freed from prison before their sentences conclude,
or as probationers, who walk free in lieu of jail time. These
prisoners-on-the-outside have in fact outnumbered the incarcerated for
decades. And recent innovations, both technological and procedural,
could enable such programs to advance to a stage where they put the
traditional model of incarceration to shame.

In a number of experimental cases, they already have. Devices such as
the one I wore on my leg already allow tens of thousands of convicts
to walk the streets relatively freely, impeded only by the knowledge
that if they loiter by a schoolyard, say, or near the house of the
ex-girlfriend they threatened, or on a street corner known for its
crack trade, the law will come to find them. Compared with
incarceration, the cost of such surveillance is minuscule—mere dollars
per day—and monitoring has few of the hardening effects of time behind
bars. Nor do all the innovations being developed depend on technology.
Similar efforts to control criminals in the wild are under way in
pilot programs that demand adherence to onerous parole guidelines,
such as frequent, random drug testing, and that provide for immediate
punishment if the parolees fail. The result is the same: convicts who
might once have been in prison now walk among us unrecognized—like pod
people, or Canadians.

There are, of course, many thousands of dangerous felons who can’t be
trusted on the loose. But if we extended this form of enhanced,
supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently
behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop.
Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears
route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts
released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our
current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly
any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step
forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.

In the 18th century, the English philosopher and social theorist
Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, a hypothetical prison. Inside
the Panopticon (the name is derived from the Greek word for
“all-seeing”), the prisoners are arranged in a ring of cells
surrounding their guard, who is concealed in a tower in the center.
The idea is that the guard controls the prisoners through his presumed
observation: they constantly imagine his eyes on them, even when he’s
looking elsewhere. Bentham promoted the concept of the Panopticon for
much the same reasons that spur criminal-justice innovation today—a
ballooning prison population and the need for a cheap solution with
light manpower demands. Whereas the guard in Bentham’s day had only
two eyes, however, today’s watcher can be virtually all-seeing, thanks
to GPS monitoring technology. The modern prisoner, in other words,
need not wonder whether he is being observed; he can be sure that he
is, and at all times.
...
As a fail-safe against any technological glitch, whether accidental or
malicious, BI is immensely proud of its backup systems, which boast an
ultrasecure data room and extreme redundancy: if, say, a toxic-gas
cloud were to wipe out the town of Anderson, the last act of the staff
there would be to flip the switches diverting all call traffic to BI’s
corporate office in Boulder, Colorado, where a team capable of taking
over instantly in case of disaster is always on duty.