No Panacea

(Vancouver Sun photo)

In the nether world between jail and release-upon-recognizance, ankle monitors are a tool favored by the justice system. However, one example shows how ineffective they can be:

Over a span of three years, judges had placed [Shaun] Bailey on electronic monitoring four times — and all four times, Bailey violated the conditions of the program, the filing said. On two occasions, he cut off his ankle monitor. In two other instances, he absconded from a treatment program the day he was admitted.

Yet, despite the arguments of prosecutor Rachel Schneider, Superior Court Judge Victor Hwang placed Bailey on electronic monitoring a fifth time. Roughly a week later, Bailey was arrested again on suspicion of robbing someone at an ATM machine on Columbus Avenue. His defense attorneys declined to comment.

To some law enforcement officials, elected leaders and court watchdogs, Bailey’s brushes with the criminal justice system illustrate a larger problem: that in an effort to release people from jail before trial, judges rely too much on electronic monitors as a form of supervision, even though evidence shows that the monitors often don’t work to deter criminal behavior.

The use of ankle bracelets is exploding, though effectiveness is, to say the least, spotty. [bold added]

San Francisco’s use of pretrial electronic monitoring rose more than twentyfold from 2017 to 2021, according to a 2022 report by UC Berkeley’s California Policy Lab.

Before 2018, the city averaged 75 cases a year. By 2021, the number had jumped to 1,650. As of Feb. 11, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto’s office was supervising 408 people on ankle monitors, all but two of them awaiting trial.

But the devices didn’t seem to be working well. People were cutting them off, tampering with them, throwing them in garbage dumps or in the bay, forgetting to charge the batteries or venturing outside their designated boundaries.

In July 2021, Miyamoto said his office was overseeing 328 people on ankle trackers, and more than a third of them — 126 — had an arrest warrant out for failing to comply. One person in the program between 2020 and 2021 was accused of breaching the rules nine times.

The California Policy Lab report found that in 2021, 60% of defendants placed on electronic monitors prior to trial in San Francisco violated their terms, with more than one-fifth arrested for new crimes.

Abolishing the carceral state is a goal of Progressivism. The least Progressives can do is put resources behind improving the monitoring technology to protect both the public and the criminals who they feel such sympathy for.

In related news thousands of illegal aliens have been released and subsequently tracked with ankle bracelets. In an August, 2023 report

Less than 2% of families arrested at the border in recent months have been selected to be put into FERM [Family Expedited Removal Management], but administration officials have said the program is rapidly expanding and they hope to eventually put a majority of families crossing the border illegally through it.

Hope that works out!