What’s the most direct way we can use technology to make Americans more free?
by Alex Lightman
Let’s make America great again by reducing the number of innocent prisoners and unnecessary prisons
We have a fresh start with the inauguration of a brand new US president. Let’s make the most of it. Now is the time for Americans to come up with new ways to
do things, taking into account the possibilities offered by new technologies, and the problems we have learned from scientific research. If we had to choose thesingle area that could be “most improved” and where the US could zoom up in international rankings the most of any area by which every nation could be
compared, what would it be?
Incarceration is the answer I have gotten when I have asked this question in various ways. The US currently incarcerates 2,220,300 adults in federal and state
prisons, and county jails. This comes to about .091% of adults, or 1 in 110 of US residents. (Stats from US Bureau of Justice Statistics). The US incarcerates more citizens than any other nation (with the exception of China, a nation with over 500% more people) and it even incarcerates more citizens per capita than any nation other than the tiny island of the Seychelles.
There are several big problems with such mass incarceration. Trapping someone inside ugly buildings with only criminals and guards caused someone to be exposed to more ideas for crime, it accelerates the loss of brain matter (making someone less capable of learning something new, preferably a skill for legal work, and the public has to pay a significant expense ($60,000 per prisoner per year is not atypical).
I have a modest proposal: expand the use of ankle monitors from the current 130,000 people wearing them to allow significant numbers of people currently in prison to live, work, and cooperate with people other than convicted felons and prison guards, but within geographic boundaries and other limits by allowing the option to nonviolent offenders of wearing an ankle bracelet with a GPS tracker.
Ankle monitoring was invented at Harvard in the 1960s by a team led by twin brothers, R. Kirkland and Robert Gable (at the time, Schwitzgebel, which means “sweating”, appropriate because that’s what prisoners do when they first get an ankle monitor put on). The ankle monitor took off when a lifelong New Mexico resident, Judge Jack Love, read that the criminal boss of New York City, the Kingpin, used a wrist monitor on Spider-Man. Judge Love thought that if it was good enough for his hero, Spider-Man, then it was good enough for the criminals he was sentencing. He got a salesman, Michael T. Gross, to get some prototypes made, and Love used these to create the very first judicially sanctioned monitoring program.
Ankle monitors have caught on, but the technology has been crude, and the interfaces have not given the “gods-eye” view that law enforcements wants, to be able to keep track of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of free ranging prisoners in a given city or area. So why advocate an approach that has been around for 34 years.
Because new technology makes ankle monitors with new GPS technology and new interfaces from new suppliers makes them more useful than ever. Recently, Cartrack, a publicly traded company that keeps track of over 600,000 cars and trucks, has entered the market with a new and improved prisoner monitoring system. The interface is excellent, and makes it very clear who is keeping the agreement to stay within certain areas, and who is not. The instant that a GPS tracked prisoner is outside of his bounding box (an area created on the computer screen with a mouse by clicking and dragging), a message will be sent to the monitored prisoner mobile phone, to Cartrack, and to the prisoner’s parole officer. A log of all the violations is kept and easily accessible to those with authorization.
This system is currently being used in what is arguably the most advanced city- state in the world, Singapore. Singapore doesn’t want to waste space and doesn’t want to waste human potential, and sees the GPS trackers as the best way to make the painful but necessary tradeoffs to maintain social order. The Singapore trial has been so successful that Cartrack was invited by Interpol to demonstrate it to representatives of 80 nations that cooperate on law enforcement across borders.
I think that the first large group of prisoners who should have the option of wearing a GPS tracker in return during their sentence in return for being released from confinement are those in US prisoners for cannabis possession. My estimate is that there are over 300,000 such prisoners. They are in prison because of the Drug Enforcement Agency has listen cannabis as a Schedule 1 substance, claiming that it has “no medical value”. This is a false classification: there are many documented medical uses of cannabis. But don’t believe the tens of thousands of people who say they improved their health by using cannabis. Believe the US government itself says: the US filed the core patent for medical applications of cannabis and was awarded that patent. To get a patent, you have to apply, and to submit a sworn statement that it is true and accurate, under penalty of perjury.
Thus, the US government swore under penalty of perjury that cannabis has beneficial medical effects, which means it should not be on Schedule 1 and which means that all those people who are in prison for cannabis convictions deserve better treatment. Maybe they are not angels. Let’s see. Let them put on GPS trackers in order to get out and give them the benefit of the doubt, and see whether they are going to be straight or not.