California Tracks Parolees With GPS, Then Ignores Alerts 160
An anonymous reader writes "Several years ago, California decided to require high-risk parolees, such as gang members and sex offenders, to wear GPS monitoring devices. The idea was to relay location information to law enforcement to ensure that the convicts stay where they're supposed to. Unfortunately, the state often misses acting on those alerts, making the devices both a lesson in the pitfalls of technology management and a massive exercise in largely useless spending."
Re:Won't somebody think of the children! (Score:3, Informative)
or at least I'd like to know WHY nobody acted on it,
Because they don't care. They don't *have* to. They're government workers. It's almost impossible to get fired from a government job in this state. They sit around not caring, spending other people money, and then retire early with a golden pension and health benefits. *That's* what is bankrupting the state. The public employee unions have complete and total control over the state legislature, but all the ideologues sit around in their reality bubbles and echo chambers blaming everything else.
There was a high profile murder case just this year where the guy was out on parole, violated parole almost ten times, had a psychologist evaluate him an a major risk, but no one did boo about it. No one cared, and another young woman was slaughtered for no damn reason.
Re:Won't somebody think of the children! (Score:5, Informative)
If you are wondering why the prisons in California are so full, it's because a few years ago we passed a "three strikes you're out" law, which means repeat offenders get life imprisonment. So they are trying creative stuff like this. Guess it's not working.
Some problems are pretty isolated to just America. (Score:2, Informative)
I see Americans do this a lot. They take a problem that's common throughout the American political system, and try to play down its negativity by suggesting it's a problem that's common elsewhere.
In reality, that's just not the case. In South Korea, Japan, Scandinavia and throughout Europe, the government actually works for the people. Then again, they don't have two shitty parties, but numerous smaller parties who have to work together, and who will quickly be replaced if they deliver only bullshit promises, rather than action, to the electorate.
Most other democracies and republics aren't like America. They aren't two party systems, where both parties are corporate-controlled. Thus many of the problems with American politics are quite isolated just to American politics. To claim they exist elsewhere is just not true, and indicative of a complete ignorance of foreign governments.
Re:High Risk Parolees? (Score:2, Informative)
Trust, but verify
Re:High Risk Parolees? (Score:4, Informative)
Google "California prison overcrowding".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/14/california-prison-overcro_0_n_611281.html [huffingtonpost.com]
-molo
Re:dear unions: (Score:5, Informative)
A larger source of the problem was starting in the 80s (Reagan) and again in the 90s (Clinton) import tariffs were dropped to almost nothing in the US with the expectation that we'd make it all back in IP jobs and money: entertainment, software and biotech.
We learned that many countries were quite happy to sell to the US with the reduced tariffs in place, but didn't drop their own, and didn't necessarily give diddly-squat about our IP and its rules.
Tariffs are quite high on sugar and textiles, but for electronics and heavy industry, it's almost non-existent.
Re:Tin foil Anklets!!! (Score:3, Informative)
The server will send an alert that it can't communicate with the unit, and (theoretically, apparently not in CA) someone will be contacting that person to check it out.
Re:Won't somebody think of the children! (Score:1, Informative)
This is California. All of their gas money is going to pay for the pensions and benefits of all the police officers, firemen and prison guards who decided to cash in at age 55 and enjoy $200,000/year retirement plans for the rest of their lives (plans negotiated by their unions).
this is the problem: (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/business/economy/21pension.html [nytimes.com]
now you tell me: do i have valid grounds to find this unacceptable?
you introduce a false conflict: that if i stand against the union stooge, that i must by some inference be supporting the ceo making 7 figures while his company crashes and burns
why can't i hate both?
why can't i hate the coddled union stooge AND the coddled ceo, at the same time?
and, most importantly, i reject the notion we should all make the same amount. please tell me we don't need to go into a remedial education about why communism fails
i support capitalism with socialist safety nets. or socialism with capitalist engines. whatever. i simply am complaining about these union stooges obviously getting away with murder. just as much murder as the ceo scumbags with the golden parachutes from the companies they helped destroy
Re:dear unions: (Score:3, Informative)
in today's day and age, a union is nothing more than a lottery ticket for lazy assholes to earn way way more than middle class salaries, for doing far less, and be accountable and responsible for nothing
Nice rant. Got anything like, you know, facts to back this up? Hey! Here's some. There has been a shift away from living wage manufacturing jobs towards lower paying service jobs for decades. The main reason? Off-shoring of those manufacturing jobs. Why go off-shore when you have the most productive workers in the world (in output per dollar spent)? Easy - corporate welfare. Ever since the Reagan years, there have been very generous tax breaks for companies who ship their manufacturing, even their raw materials, overseas. In the eighties, I watched lumber mill after paper mill close down in the Pacific Northwest, sometimes taking whole towns with them. It wasn't unions that did this. It was the fact that it was so much more profitable to sell and ship raw logs to Japan than to process them here. No, not because of wages, but because the taxes charged on that international transaction (taking wages and tax revenues with it) were a fraction of what they would have been if the timber were processed here. Unions had nothing to do with this.
NAFTA, no unions, are the reason that the American economy is failing. Yes, there are indeed "union jobs" that are held by "lazy assholes". Wish I had one. But I don't. You probably don't either. In fact most of us don't, which is why trying to typify them in that matter is exactly what your boss wants you to think, you dimwit.
Re:They screwed themselves by publicizing this (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I have talked to people who actually manage these programs on the commercial side as part of an informational exchange for similar sorts of technology situations (we track fleet vehicles via GPS and cellular, they track people). There are a lot of different reasons to have these programs, including:
Making sure that the subject does not go to certain places or stays in certain places (of course)
but also:
Having a historical record of the whereabouts of the subject
Determining if the subject enters the same area as another subject
A false positive on an actual real-time event could cause a car to be erroneously sent to the location of a subject, but might just as easily just result in a phone call to the subject to verify their location and indicate that they have been seen in the wrong place.
Let's face it, you will *never* have enough manpower to track every call. There are far more law-abiding people than criminals, but there are more criminals than cops by far as well. Parole is a fact of life, you are going to have parolees unless you start executing people like the used to when they shoplift or commit various other more petty crimes.
However, even if the people are not caught, you can use the GPS data in court to convict them when they are caught, and you can even determine if an offender was in the area of a crime even if the zone was not restricted one (ie. someone wandered into the subject close vicinity and the subject killed them or something). They do not just track if the subject leaves their allowed zone or enters a restricted area, they also keep minute-by-minute data on actual location and store it forever.
I am definitely in a related business, so I have a vested interest in this, but do realize that even if alarms don't allow pickups of all subjects at all times who stray outside the limits, they do allow for subjects to be caught and more importantly, possibly deterred when there is no other method that would have worked before GPS tracking. There has never been a time where there were enough cops to track all criminals, and a GPS tracking system certainly makes it easier for a much smaller force to respond to a larger number of events. But we all knew that, right?
If anything the issues with the tracking system is a call for departments to learn how to use these systems properly, as opposed to using them to replace officers on the street which has never been their purpose.
Re:well yeah (Score:5, Informative)
A union allows workers to bargain with employers collectively. Corporations act collectively (RIAA, MPAA, other industry associations), why shouldn't workers?
The reason Chinese workers are cheaper than American workers is because the cost of living is cheaper there. When I was in Thailand in the USAF in 1974 you could take a bus anywhere in the country for a nickle, buy a tailored silk shirt for $10, feed four people in a restaraunt for a dollar. I paid thirty dollars a month to rent my bungalow (when I got back, for comparison, I paid $160 a month for a shotgun house in the slums and a McDonalds "meal" cost two bucks for one person). Now tell me how you can possibly compete with that?
And here's a little tip: most union workers don't earn $150k/yr. I have a friend who's worked for the postal service for thirty years fixing those big mail boxes, he makes $75k. Were it not for his union he'd probably be making little more than minimum wage.
Unless you're a corporatist or business owner, you're dead wrong about unions. Any working person who is anti-union is stupid, ignorant, or crazy.