Community Corrections High–Tech Challenges and Solutions
By Michelle Gaseau, Managing Editor

1/30/2006

A few years ago, New Mexico officials decided that Global Positioning System technology could be the solution for implementing more intense monitoring of sex offenders.  But one problem remained: how could officials determine which technology product would be right for the state?

Corrections officials didn’t have the time or the money to conduct a study of all the potential products they could use, so they asked for help from the NIJ- funded Rural Law Enforcement Technology Center in Kentucky. The result was an objective study that tested several different active and passive GPS systems in both urban and rural settings in New Mexico and a report that showed the performance of each.

“When you rely on vendors to tell you how their product works you never get the full story and they won’t advertise their weaknesses and sometimes emphasize their strengths,” said George Drake, Deputy Director for the Probation and Parole Division, New Mexico Department of Corrections. “It helped us figure out what really works and to see it from an objective perspective.”

When New Mexico officials received the results of the research, they were able to make smarter decisions about which type of device would work best for the department and the true options that were available to them.

Tod Depp, Technology Assistant for the Justice and Safety Center at Eastern Kentucky University, which conducted the study for RULETC, said New Mexico’s problem is a common one and without testing, agencies may end up buying products that don’t fit their needs.

“It becomes an issue for these agencies sometimes. If it is something new they are looking into getting, [many times] they don’t have a lot of money to [implement it],” said Depp. “For those who do get the chance to buy something new, they should buy the best possible fit for their department. A vendor might come in and say this is the latest and greatest, but how do you know whether it is or is not. There isn’t a Consumer Reports out there on this.”

Finding the right technology is a definite challenge for community corrections agencies.

New Mexico Testing Project Reveals Pros and Cons

As part of the RULETC study, which was dubbed the Post-Incarceration Active Remote Offender Location Evaluation [PAROLE], New Mexico officials wanted to look at both active GPS, which tracks offenders in real time and provides notification if an offender has strayed beyond allowable areas, and passive GPS, which provides offender location data once the device is connected to a phone line terminal or port.

The researchers from EKU set out to test four commercially available GPS devices in two different New Mexico environments – Albuquerque –which is more urban, and a rural community. According to project staff, the site selection was important because sex offenders would be from both area types and the cellular phone structure needed for many GPS systems would be different in each area.

“With the technology, it relies on a cellular network to report the data. To transmit the location data [of the offender] it has to reply on a cellular network tower. If you didn’t have a cellular tower, then the data couldn’t be reported,” said Depp.

What the research team found was that the cellular networks were not sufficient in the rural area to support an active GPS that officials could “poll” at any time for information. When these connections were not available, the active systems essentially worked as passive ones, downloading information once the offender places the device it is phone system dock.

The researchers also conducted tamper tests on the devices to determine whether the devices could be removed, including the bucket test, where the device is emerged in water to keep the device’s built-in electric circuit connected through the water as it is being removed. One of the devices was defeated in this test.

The final report, which will be made public later this year, lists the tests and the performance of each device – an invaluable tool for corrections agencies looking into the purchase or lease of this technology.

With the information from the PAROLE study, officials were able to move ahead with their plans for a GPS monitoring system fro sex offenders. They chose a passive GPS system from Pro-Tech Monitoring, a Florida-based company that tested well in the study.

According to Drake, the department opted for the passive system based on the research, which told officials that true active monitoring was not possible in rural areas.

“If we did active tracking, which we will do, we obviously need to have cell phone coverage, but at this time it’s just not possible, in particular in Indian reservations,” said Drake.

The study results also helped the state look long and hard at the logistics of implementing active GPS, since staff would be needed to respond to potential violations at any time, day or night.

“Not only does the equipment [for active GPS] cost twice as much to least, but the larger issue is if you get an alarm you better prepared to respond to it, otherwise if it’s a real serious crime and an officer didn’t respond, they’d be asking why and we don’t have that manpower,” said Drake.

Despite the challenges, the Probation and Parole Division is working on a future solution for this problem by partnering with county sheriff’s departments in urban areas of the state where active GPS would likely be used.

The first of these partnerships will be with Bernalillo County, where an active GPS pilot is slated for later this year. The agreement calls for probation and parole officers to cover responses during the day and sheriff’s deputies to respond during off duty times. The agreement will also allow for GPS tracking of offenders who are of particular interest to the sheriff’s department.

“It will be the only way we will be able to have active supervision,” Drake said.

There are other challenges for community corrections agencies hoping to use GPS systems and the hope of some in the field is that the technology will advance enough to address them.

Identifying Challenges to GPS Systems

According to Joe Russo, Program Manager – Corrections, National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center in Denver, community corrections officials see two main issues that need to be addressed with GPS – the ability to “continuously” monitor and what to do with the volumes of information the systems provide.

According to Russo, current GPS-based systems have significant limitations when it comes to continuously monitoring offenders.

“The most obvious limitation is that these systems cannot track offenders when they move indoors, underground or anywhere else the satellite system can’t ‘see’ them,” said Russo. “By some estimates, offenders, like most people, spend 85 to 90 percent of their time indoors, so there is a considerable gap here.”

Russo said focus groups of practitioners have determined that a combination of continuous location and tracking system using GPS technology with wide-area terrestrial based systems, which are land-based tracking systems, would be better suited to their needs.

“It’s important to note that such a system might not be available for some time and even then, it, like every technology, will have its own limitations,” he said.

The second issue with GPS systems relates to the amount of information that is generated, and unused. 

Russo said typically, a supervising officer will set up exclusion and/or inclusion zones for each offender based on the case management plan.  That means that the officer will only receive an alert if the offender deviates from the approved location or if there is some indication that the offender is trying to tamper with, remove or otherwise counteract the device.  Existing GPS tracking systems are designed to be exception-based so as not to overwhelm the supervising officer, he said.

What happens is a large amount of information is not being used or shared by the corrections agency or any other agency.

“There is a tremendous amount of data generated that could be very useful in the management of the offender that is not being used because the officer doesn’t have the time to manually ‘connect the dots,’” Russo added.

Russo said what ultimately would fit the bill is for these systems to have an automated way of processing data that identifies patterns of behavior and anomalies. 

One example could be of a sex offender on GPS who, every Wednesday night on his way home from work, lingers in one location before continuing home.  The offender has not entered an exclusion zone, nor has he deviated from his approved route from the work location to his home and, in this case, there are no apparent violation, Russo said.

But automated processing software could analyze all the data collected and be able to alert the supervising officer of this repetitive behavior and other patterns.

“Armed with this information the officer would be able to determine that the location that the sex offender tends to stop at is a bowling alley and further investigation might reveal that Wednesday evening is Youth Night and the sex offender lingers in this area as parents are dropping their children off for a night of bowling,” Russo said. 

He added that this type of software already exists and is being used in other settings, but has not yet been adapted to corrections GPS systems.

But despite these challenges, some agencies are plowing forward to do what they can now with the technology as it exists.

Massachusetts and Vermont Pilot Tracking Systems

Last year, Massachusetts Probation officials began a pilot program to monitor sex offenders through active GPS.

According to Paul Lucci, Deputy Commissioner for the Massachusetts Probation Service, the monitoring program began in May of last year and currently includes about 90 level-three sex offenders located throughout the state. Lucci said the program has worked well so far and he is excited about the additional layer of supervision the technology provides.

“The most important thing is you have all these types of probation [but] this is the highest level of supervision to date. We know where you are walking around during the day; it can enhance the supervision. We know exactly where they are,” Lucci said.

The Massachusetts Probation Division tested about a half dozen different devices before settling on an active GPS vendor. Lucci said the technology is a far cry from the typical electronic monitoring where officers know when an offender is in this home, or when he is out, but do not know the offender’s exact location.

With active GPS, officers can watch offenders moving on a computer screen that is mapped to their location. They can know what address they are at and how long they stay there.

And while some GPS systems have the technology companies to do the monitoring for the agency, the Massachusetts Probation Service actually has its own officers watching the GPS screen 24 hours a day and responding to any violations.

“We can see someone in a dead stop. We see you in a playground. It’s all mapped. We have the ability to call them and they can only answer the phone, [not call out from it,]” said Lucci.

Lucci said so far, the system has enabled the officers to pull one offender out of a pre-programmed exclusion area – a playground. The next step for Massachusetts officials is to train more officers on the implementation and use of the devices so that the program can be expanded.

In Vermont, officials are also testing the waters of offender monitoring. Starting next month the state will begin a pilot project that involves offenders in the community on pre-approved furlough.

According to Alan Cormier, Community Corrections Program Supervisor in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the state legislature authorized a $100,000 expenditure to test a combination of passive GPS tracking systems and trans-dermal systems on this select group of offenders.

“Provided it works well, it would be expanded to other offenders. That would be our goal to see that it does work and it is effective,” said Cormier.

The project is a long time in the making.

According to Steve Lickwar, Assistant Director of Field Services for the Vermont DOC, the department had looked into the technology previously, but it was not until a governor’s investigation was conducted into overcrowding in correctional facilities that the pilot was given the go-ahead.

Lickwar said that the technology is very interesting to corrections officials, but they were also concerned about having control over which offenders would be issued the devices.

“Overall there’s a certain intrigue to the technology and it showed promise, but in sentencing situations and given the situation that judges are independent, there was nothing stopping them from making it a condition of [probation or parole] for any corrections case,” Lickwar said.

So DOC officials spoke to state legislators about the issue and got the commitment to begin the pilot with low-level, non-violent offender who were already on furlough in the community.

The monitoring will provide the community corrections supervisors another option for managing offender violations in the community. According to Lickwar, offenders on the furlough program are typically sent directly back to jail or prison when they violate their conditions of release or probation. With the passive GPS and transdermal systems, community supervising officers now have a graduated sanction before sending the offender back to an incarcerated setting.

“We were already diverting people we thought could be successfully supervised, but what you get is a revolving door of going to jail,” he said.

Vermont officials hope that the tracking system option will make a difference in deterring offenders from violating the terms of their probation or release.

“The advantage to electronic monitoring is in moving the people that don’t need supervision into telephonic [passive] supervision and putting those [left-over] resources toward the people who need to be supervised.  If there’s a payoff in the shift of resources, that’s where we think we’d make the most impact,” said Lickwar.

Although Lickwar likes the idea of more advanced technologies such as the active GPS system, which would also likely serve as a greater deterrent to violating offenders, he is wary about the resources required to respond and the true benefit.

“The future is we need to use technology to do these things smarter and not just apply it over the old way. [The active system] looks like it is a deterrent [when it is on], but there is no difference between those who have it on and those who don’t in terms of long term recidivism rates,” he said.

Lickwar and others in the field believe that it is important for corrections officials to look at new technologies clearly, understand what really works with each individual corrections system and chose them based on resources and effectiveness.

Resources:
New Mexico DOC - http://corrections.state.nm.us/

Alan Cormier - (802)748-6602
Massachusetts Division of Probation http://www.mass.gov/courts/probation/