Considering tech solutions on jail safety

As jailers across Texas and policymakers at the capitol consider new means to prevent jail suicides, our friend Diana Claitor from the Texas Jail Project pointed out to me that new electronic guard check systems are being created for tracking inmate welfare checks by jailers. In California, according to this article, such systems were installed to reduce high suicide rates in state prisons:

In a bid to curtail inmate suicides, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has deployed an electronic tracking system that prison guards must use to carry out welfare checks at 33 institutions.

The Inmate Welfare Check System (IWCS) is designed to more accurately record the time and location of all welfare checks of inmates housed in the Administrative Segregation Unit.

"CDCR will be able to capture accurate, real-time data when conducting welfare checks of inmates, Joe Panora, the director of Enterprise Information Services wrote in an Oct. 15 CDCR blog post.

The system will allow the department to "increase our efficiency and overall effectiveness providing sound reportable data, while adhering to court mandates and reducing the percentage of inmate suicide attempts," Panora added.

Inmates in the ASU must be checked on at least three times an hour, at intervals not to exceed 30 minutes during the first three weeks.

The new system is composed of three parts: small devices called ibuttons installed at the front of each cell with a unique digital address; a Guard One Rounds Tracker "pipe," which reads the ibutton to record the time and location of the check; and a leather wallet that contains 12 ibuttons intended to correspond to an inmate’s current activity.

The system is simple to use. To record the welfare check, a guard touches the pipe to the ibutton on the front of the cell and then touches the pipe to the ibutton in the leather wallet to record an inmate’s activity.

At the end of each shift, an officer inserts the pipe into the Internet Protocol Downloader to securely transfer all of the time, location and activity data across LAN/WAN.

Diana wondered if this was "better than paper logs or just a high tech gadget doing exactly the same thing?" as well as "is it easy to manipulate?"

Certainly the system described above would be harder to manipulate than paper, since anyone can write down wrong information. Having to record each inmate's status from 12 options - in the example in the article - would mean they couldn't just hand the pipe to an inmate to walk through the dorm, someone would have to record information at each cell. That'd be hard to fake.

So that does seem superior to paper logs to me. That said, because there are many ways to set up such a system, I don't necessarily recommend the CA vendor over others - I don't know enough about the players in the market or their products. Conceptually, though, it makes a lot of sense.

Beyond documenting guard work, there are all sorts of ways one could imagine using Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFIDs) or GPS tracking to improve security at prisons.

For that matter, there are sensors that conceivably could be used to further inmate safety, right down to in-cell heart and health monitoring. For example, Grits happens to be an amateur electronics hobbyist. Here's the list of sensors on sale at one of the online maker sites I use.

Anything a sensor can capture generates data you can measure, log, compare, analyze, etc..  So, for example, if the only way to commit suicide involves standing on the bed, you could put a pressure sensor in it so that, if the weight were above a certain number of pounds per square inch (standing instead of laying), it would call the guard, collapse the bed, or otherwise intervene to stop a suicide event. I'm brainstorming, but offer that example just to suggest that sensors could be used in all sorts of creative ways.

All this to say, I wouldn't spurn the idea out of hand that an array of new products and yet-to-be-invented electronic gizmos might improve prison and jail safety, even if early adopters may be penalized as prototypes are refined. There's an electronics revolution going on right now related to these sorts of sensor systems and the "Internet of Things," so it would be premature to dismiss the notion that its influence might productively seep into corrections.

Related: Wearable tech and the corrections market

Most Twin Peaks bikers off ankle monitors, few if any prosecutions likely

None of the 177 Twin Peaks bikers remain incarcerated in the county jail, even though all of them initially were assigned a $1 million bond, and of 135 required to wear ankle monitors, reported the Waco Tribune-Herald, all but 22 have been allowed to remove them "after agreements between their attorneys and state prosecutors to amend the conditions of their bonds." Grits thought these comments, representing one of the few informed views I've seen on the topic from anyone outside the DA's office, are likely prescient.

Houston attorney Paul Looney said two of his three clients, a married couple from Brenham, were not required to wear the ankle monitors and his third client had his removed in an agreement with prosecutors.

“I can only speculate, but my guess is that the ones that are still wearing the ankle bracelets present some type of specific flight risk, or, in the alternative, their lawyers are lazy and they just haven’t come in to visit with the prosecutor,” he said. “A lot of lawyers haven’t done that.”

Looney cautioned that there likely is no connection between levels of culpability and those still wearing ankle monitors.

“I have gone through the discovery, and right now I am of the opinion that they might not successfully prosecute anybody who is still alive. I think they may have a couple of dead people they may be able to convict, but the ones who committed the crimes are dead. Everybody else was defending themselves or other people,” Looney said.

If it's really true that no one alive can be prosecuted, history will judge the roundup of 177 bikers much differently than the DA and local officials are presently portraying.

Relatedly, GQ published the most extensive piece of investigative journalism yet on the Twin Peaks massacre, piecing together narratives from dozens of interviews. Give it a read.

Chief: Body cam vendors doing 'the Johnny Manziel money sign'

Dallas Police Chief David Brown made a wry observation that the push for police to wear body cameras will lead to some lucrative contracts: “'It makes me want to retire and buy body camera stock,' Brown told an audience at a Verizon Wireless conference Thursday. 'It makes me want to sit on the beach and do the Johnny Manziel money sign. Because it’s a seller’s market.'”

The Texas Legislature ponied up $10 million for body cams this year and local agencies and DA's offices have spent millions more equipping officers with cameras in the last 12 months.

See related Grits coverage:

• Wearable tech and the corrections market
• Police tech: Bodycams, Google Glass, and cop cars of the future
• Taser's business model on police body cams

Wearable tech and the corrections market

GPS ankle monitor: Looks uncomfortable

Lately, your correspondent has been fiddling in my spare time with a hobbyist-level wearable technology project involving a couple of cheap sensors (which soon will be) wired into a pair of gloves to generate beats, tones, and lights. In the process, I've become more familiar with the state of wearable technology, even attending a Austin techie meetup on the topic a few weeks back.

It's not hard to imagine useful implications in different industries for wearable tech, but as a distinct consumer market, many observers view the field as a disappointment. The Guardian recently asked, "Wearable technology hasn't taken off the way it was expected to - why not?" A few serious, local startups are working on exercise or health-related wearable apps, but consumers haven't bitten beyond a few kids in light-up tennis shoes or cheap club gear. At this point, your refrigerator and thermostat are more likely to talk to your computer than your clothes.

What you don't see in any of the business tech press about wearables are analyses of wearable tech in the law enforcement and corrections industries, though that may be their biggest field of success so far. The use of GPS trackers on probationers and pretrial defendants out on bail has become so ubiquitous that larger departments suffer from data overload. In treatment courts, but also in some jurisdictions for regular DWI probationers, so-called SCRAM technology - an anklet with a sensor that measures alcohol in one's perspiration - are so popular that Texas courts can't afford nearly all of them that judges would like to use. (I'm waiting for the day probationers' anklet can talk to them; the tech already exists.)

Awkward police 'body cam'

Setting aside community supervision issues, police officers today are ever-more frequently decked out with body mics and cameras, a market that Taser International leads almost by default. Police today often make traffic stops in state of the art body armor, boasting an array of gadgetry around their belts that remind one of Batman. To the extent that routine tech can be incorporated seamlessly into something the officer is wearing anyway - especially tech that can transmit useful data back to a supervisor in real time - there's a significant law-enforcement market to be had.

For quite some time, cops and crooks arguably have been the biggest markets for "wearable tech," even if it's seldom discussed in that frame. That will remain true for the near future, with much room for expansion in that market in the near term. There's even a (perhaps overly optimistic) argument to be made that wearable corrections tech could "make it possible to replace the system of large-scale imprisonment," that manufacturers in that market contribute to progressive de-incarceration goals.

I'd love to see a company like Adafruit take on wearable tech for law enforcement - somebody that cares if the product is ugly, if it's elegant, well-designed, comfortable, if it works as advertised. If Adafruit started re-imagining police body cams and alcohol sensors for probationers, IMO they'd leave Taser and SCRAM in the dust. Those folks have forgotten more about wearable tech than the other two companies likely know.

The wearable market so far has pigeon-holed itself largely into areas - exercise and health - where people themselves use generated data, or fashion, where sensor data may trigger an accessory but not necessarily a paper trail. In corrections fields, though, it's police management, probation officers, or pretrial services divisions that make use of the data, not the wearer themselves. Those sorts of institutional customers with significant baseline demand constitute a captive market, if you'll pardon the pun. While it may seem distasteful to design technologies of control, it's better if highly skilled engineers sensitive to the wearers' experience create this tech. Either way, somebody's going to profit from it. Bet on that.

Zocalo, Mexico City, a great place for light-up garb at night

BTW, I do think there's an untapped market for a lot of the light-up or sound-generating wearable stuff for youth, but a lot of those items come relatively cheap from China and suffer from low margins. The more significant profit potential comes when you can find ongoing, real-world uses for wearable-generated data, which is why Grits foresees big profits for wearables in the corrections market.

AN ASIDE: Just for fun, we took some light-up garb with us to Mexico City to the zocalo after dark: The granddaughter's hoodie with EL Wire stitched around the edges, a few dozen small glow sticks, a couple of balloons with flashing RGB LEDs inside them, and three battery operated EL Wire strands long enough to use as a jump rope, one of which ended up lining a hat. Folks approached in gaggles wanting to buy one or the other of the light-up goodies, with somebody offering five times for a strand of EL Wire what I'd paid for it. We gave away glow-stick bracelets to the kids and referred would-be customers to the websites where I'd bought them. (This was a great way to meet families with kids, btw.) When it was bed time, the young'un gave away the balloons with flashing LEDs to a couple of little girls in the square and distributed the last of the glowsticks to a passel of teenagers before she turned, hoodie flashing, and we walked back through the seemingly ever-present multitude to our hotel. SEE MORE from a kid-centric vacation here.

TPPF in the news: Reducing technical revocations, clarifying recidivism data

A couple of recent Texas Public Policy Foundation reports got good press coverage this week:

• Texas Tribune: "Lawmakers urged to reform parole with technology"
• Report: Cutting Edge Corrections: Using technology to improve community supervision in Texas

and

• Texas Observer: "The conservative case against locking up minors"
• Report: Kids doing time for what's not a crime: The over-incarceration of status offenders

Good idea on reducing technical probation revocations
In the report on supervision tech, I particularly liked this suggestion for reducing incarceration based on technical violations of petty absconders:

Currently, there are more than 24,000 felony probation absconders in Texas. While they may succeed for a time in skirting their obligations to report to a probation officer when they are pulled over for a traffic violation or are otherwise apprehended, they will face the prospect of being revoked to prison. At least 35 percent of probationers revoked for technical violations (where there is no allegation of a new offense) were classified as absconders at the time. Based on the 12,287 total technical revocations in 2013, this amounts to at least 4,300 technical revocations associated with absconders, which translates into annual incarceration costs of $79 million, not counting the compounding effect over time as the revocation time served will exceed a year in most cases.

This analysis demonstrates the potential of utilizing GPS to reduce the number of technical revocations. Given that any type of GPS monitoring costs a fraction of the $50.49 per day prison cost,  it is a particularly sensible option for those who were placed on probation for a non-violent offense and have failed to report, but are not assessed as a high risk of re-offending. (Citations omitted.)

Recidivism clarification
In the comments to the Trib story, I offered one minor but important correction. The reporter had written that "Sixty-two percent of all Texas inmates return to prison within three years of their release. But that's not quite right.

Looking at the TPPF report, it says 62% of state jail inmates, not "all Texas inmates" are rearrested within three years, not "return to prison." State jail inmates have the highest recidivism rates of all prisoners, in part because they serve sentences day for day and leave without any post-incarceration supervision.

According to the Legislative Budget Board's latest report on the topic titled "Statewide Criminal Justice Recidivism and Revocation Rates" (pdf), the percentage of Texas prisoners who return to prison after three years was 22.6% for the most recent cohort - far lower than the national average. Among state jail inmates the number returning to prison is slightly higher - 31.1%.

The difference between rearrest and re-incarceration numbers is significant. After all, in Texas you can be arrested for a Class C misdemeanor, so many ex-offenders who are rearrested for minor offenses within three years of release do not actually return to prison.

UPDATE: The Tribune has updated its story to correct the error.

Body-worn IMSI catcher takes covert phone snooping to next level

IMSI catchers, known more commonly by the biggest selling trade name, "Stingray" devices," are fake cell-phone towers that police use to capture nearby cell traffic and fool it into running calls through a police-operated device small enough to deploy in a squad car. Now they're big enough to wear as clothing.

ACLU's Chris Soghoian described the feds' deployment of Stingray-type technology (that's a trade name, the technical term is "IMSI catcher") worn by law enforcement as a vest at the conference on Location Tracking and Biometrics, an event Grits attended at the Yale Law School, thanks to with reader support) earlier this year, which was the first I'd heard of it. Now we learn more about the body-worn tech in a new report from Ars Technica ("The body worn 'IMSI catcher' for all your covert snooping needs," Sept. 1), which opened:

Recently leaked brochures advertising next generation spy devices give outsiders a glimpse into the high-tech world of government surveillance. And one of the most tantalizing of the must-have gizmos available from a company called GammaGroup is a body-worn device that surreptitiously captures the unique identifier used by cell phones.

"The unit is optimized for short range covert operation, designed to allow users to get close to Target(s) to maximize the changes of only catching the Target(s') identities and minimal unwanted collateral," one of the marketing pamphlets boasts. "The solution can be used as a standalone device or integrated into wider data-gathering and geo-tracking systems."

At just 41 x 33 x 18 centimeters, the device is small enough to fit under a shirt. It needs from one to 90 seconds to capture the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) or international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) of the person being tracked. It works on all GSM-based networks regardless of country and is fully operational even when functioning in a moving vehicle. The same brochure advertises several other varieties of IMSI catchers, including some that work in a totable briefcase and one that receives signals from a covert vehicle roof bar antenna. The James Bond spying tools are sold to government agencies and law enforcement organizations.

Soghoian described experiments by the feds having agents with body-worn IMSI vests walking through crowds at political rallies and recording the ID of every cell phone that pinged,. That gave them a lot of baseline data about who was at the event, how to target their phone if need be in the future, etc., Combined with the rise of license plate readers, continued warrantless access to historic location data (at least for now), a national facial recognition database about to come online, and near ubiquitous surveillance in most public places, the potential uses and misuses of such more-or-less unregulated police technology boggles the mind.

Read the whole thing.

Police tech: Body cams, Google Glass, and cop cars of the future

A decade ago Texas passed significant incentives as part of its 2003 racial profiling statute to put dashcams in police cars, with voters approving $18 million to pay for departments to install them. At the time the police unions complained of "Big Brother" and chiefs said they couldn't afford the expense. Since then, dashcams have proven invaluable both in prosecuting crime and protecting officers from false accusations, as well as occasionally catching police misconduct on video (at least when they don't conveniently "malfunction," which is a recurring theme when misconduct allegations arise). Very few Texas LEOs complain about them anymore, the benefits so far outweigh the detriments.

Now a new generation of cameras - so-called "body cams" - are stirring up a nearly identical debate. Cops in New York City are balking at their use. But Fort Worth, Austin, and other cities are both joining the trend of agencies experimenting with body cams, and where they're in use police officials sing their praises. Here's a news report out of California where the Rialto PD has decided to use body cams for all their officers:


In particular they find them useful for writing reports and ensuring that law enforcement testimony is as credible and backed up as possible. The cameras aren't a cure-all but they'd solve a lot of problems and prevent many he-said she-said disputes.

A related technological development are law enforcement applications being designed for Google Glass, where officers would get information related to vehicles, suspects, video feeds, etc., though the Google Glass technology in real time. According to Tech Crunch (Aug. 19):

Mutualink is demoing one such app today at APCO, a conference for public safety communications, with its Glass App for police, firefighters and first responders.

The app would allow public safety officers and officials to communicate in real-time via streaming video from the scene, as well as to receive and view key documents, including things like building schematics, medical records of victims, live feeds of security cameras in the area and more. It’s the ultimate on-demand intel platform for agents working in the field, and a way to stay in contact with HQ and other organizations even when radio systems won’t talk to each other.

Of course, there could be privacy concerns with such an app. Recently, news came out that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other officials in the U.S. oppose the idea of police body cameras, suggesting they’d be open to all kinds of dangerous interpretation. Mutualink says its solution emphasizes agency control of media and recording on glass, so privacy would be in the hands of the cops and other officials using them and should be protected.

A tactical heads-up display being used by safety officers is a natural fit for Glass, and as the enforcement agents would be using the head-mounted computer as part of their uniform, they wouldn’t have to worry about looking like idiots, so this could be a place where Google actually finds some long-term adoption. Mutualink is also already a service provider used by NATO Special Operations Forces, homeland security, police and fire departments, so it has the relationships in place to make this happen.

It’s not Robocop, but it’s a step closer.

Robocop, indeed! This application brings to mind fantasy and science fiction scenarios that not long ago seemed too fantastic to believe. Readers with children might recall J.K. Rowling's "Omnioculars" in the Harry Potter series where sports fans (in that case, Quidditch) could see instant replays, slow down action and retrieve detailed information about the game, players, strategies, etc., by looking through magical lenses.  Or, consider the contemporary TV show, Continuum, on the SciFi channel, where the main character is a cop from the future who wears a special suit linked to a chip in her head that presents real-time data linkages, facial recognition analyses, and even monitors vital signs of people in view of the agent. Suddenly, those sorts of uses seem less fanciful than just a short time ago.

While we're on the subject of police tech, the Los Angeles Auto Show asked car manufacturers to come up with examples of what police vehicles would/should look like in 2025. See a slideshow with examples.

The Google Glass app, police body cams, and probably even the vehicles could and likely would  eventually be merged, giving police more information on the world around them but also gathering video and audio of what the cop sees, hears, says and does - these technologies inevitably cut both ways.

Surveillance blimps a fine place to start military budget cuts

A US Air Force surveillance blimp, soon to lose funding

At Texas GOP-Vote, David Bellow laments that the Obama Administration will end a contractor-run program along the Texas-Mexico border operating blimps as part of what the Air Force called its Tethered Aerostat Radar System, or TARS, which "is an aerostat-borne, surveillance program." (If you, like me, didn't realize that "aerostat" is a synonym for a moored blimp, then we've both learned something today.)

Grits has gotta say, if the federal government must reduce spending, cutting the budget for surveillance blimps to me seems like a good place to start. (Reminds me of the alternate universe from Fringe.) Bellow reports that the contractor sent out an email to its employees, which he reprinted in full, announcing that the Air Force would cease funding for the project as of March 15, 2013. An employee who (understandably) insisted upon anonymity told Bellow that "Without these defense radars, low flying aircraft will go undetected. It will be open season for any drug/gun/slave smugglers, terrorists flying in with nukes, low altitude missiles, or even a full scale low elevation invasion/attack against America.” Uh huh. Those blimps and the Rio Grande were all that stood between us and a "full scale low level invasion/attack," says the anonymous guy who'll lose his job if the contract runs out. Lucky the river's still there. In reality, given the actual nature of border violence and the intense buildup of Border Patrol, customs agents and, often redundantly, the Department of Public Safety, along the Rio Grande, it's laughable to give this contractor's surveillance blimps much credit. One imagines the US Air Force feels perfectly secure they're up to job of stopping a "full scale invasion/attack" from the south without this company's services, since they're the ones who cut them loose. If you do call your Senator or Congressperson, as per Mr. Bellow's request, Grits would suggest telling them, "Support the Air Force's decision and don't spend one more dime on surveillance blimps."

Misdemeanor offenders may serve sentences under electronic monitoring under McLennan cost-saving measure

McLennan County (Waco) has approved a new electronic monitoring program for convicted misdemeanants aimed at reducing incarceration costs that spurred a recent tax hike. Reported the Herald-Tribune ("County commissioners OK ankle bracelet monitoring of low-risk offenders," Oct. 2)

McLennan County commissioners gave final approval Monday to a program designed to let some low-risk criminal offenders serve jail sentences under electronically monitored house arrest.

In unanimous votes, the commissioners court created the electronic monitoring program and hired a vendor to run it. Dallas-based Recovery Healthcare Corp. will administer the program from a vacant office on the first floor of the McLennan County Courthouse Annex in Waco.

The votes followed years of work marked by legal hurdles and, at times, a lack of support from local judges.

Commissioners renewed the push this year to fight the rising cost of jail overcrowding and convinced county court-at-law judges, who handle misdemeanors, to sign on.

“We should have done this years ago,” Commissioner Lester Gibson said.

Under the program, judges can give low-risk, work-release or weekend inmates the option of serving their county jail sentences at home under electronic monitoring.

County officials hope the program eases overcrowding at the McLennan County Jail and lowers the cost of housing overflow inmates at the privately run Jack Harwell Detention Center.

The county spent about $3 million on overflow inmate housing in the budget year that ended Sunday — $2 million more than budgeted — and plans to spend at least $3 million again this year, according to projections.

Commissioners cited the housing costs as a major reason behind the 2-cent property tax rate increase they approved last month.

Offenders must pay a $50 enrollment fee and $8 to $8.50 per day to participate in the program, but the county also antiicipates it will be used for indigent defendants, for whom the county would be charged $7 to $7.50 per day:. Even so:

County officials expect to save money even by paying for indigent defendants’ monitoring because it is cheaper than housing them in jail, said Mike Dixon, a county attorney involved in the contract negotiations.

The county spends $45.50 a day for each inmate it houses at the Harwell center and more than $50 a day on each inmate at the county jail, officials have said.

Surveillance Tech: Fantasies of tin-foil hat crowd coming true

Examining the array of high-tech gadgetry available to law-enforcement to monitor people, Wired magazine identifies "Nine reasons Wired readers should wear tinfoil hats." They are:

• Warrantless Wiretapping
• Warrantless GPS Tracking
• Tracking Devices in Your Pocket
• Fake Cell Phone Towers
• The Border Exception
• The “6 Months and It’s the Government’s” Rule under ECPA
• The Patriot Act
• Government Malware
• Known Unknowns

License plate readers coupled with roadside cameras would've made my Top 9 list, but it's hard to fault these choices. Problem is, Fourth Amendment issues are a political nightmare, with a sturdy bipartisan consensus among  elite circles for gutting its protections like a fish. For those who think voting Democrat will save you from such abuses, please read this paragraph from the Wired story carefully:

The Obama administration claims Americans have no right to privacy in their public movements. The issue surfaced this month in a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if law enforcement agents should be required to obtain a probable-cause warrant in order to place a GPS tracking device on a citizen’s car. The government admitted to the Supreme Court that it thinks it would have the power to track the justices’ cars without a warrant.

As for Republicans, short of a Ron Paul upset victory in the primaries, I doubt any current presidential candidate would be better than Obama on the subject and some would be much worse. So in the near term we're not going to vote our way out of this.

In the government arena, that leaves the courts (which are sharply divided on the subject), or else constructing bipartisan legislative coalitions on narrow, popular elements of a Fourth Amendment reform agenda. Examples that might have legs could be: Rolling back routine TSA frisks at the federal level, requiring warrants to access cell-phone data (which the states could do), or empowering drivers at traffic stops to refuse searches and avoid arrest for fine-only offenses (bills passed by the Texas Lege that Rick Perry vetoed).

Grits also continues to believe that the market may provide better short-medium term preventives than the courts to abuse of such technologies as detection devices become cheaper and more widespread.

The kinds of technologies described by Wired concern me, but such controls can only go so far. Think of a game of chess: Both players can see all of the other player's pieces, but unable to peer into your opponent's mind, it's still easy to be defeated. Besides, all these new technologies are labor intensive: They mainly generate mountains of data that some government employee (or these days, perhaps a private contractor) must sort through then presumably do something with. In an era of government downsizing, there's a limit to the amount of resources which can be applied to such endeavors. So surveillance has practical limits and its wide application is antithetical to popular calls for budget cutting and government efficiency. That's the good news.

The bad news, says Wired: "a tinfoil hat won’t help you at all." Via FourthAmendment.com.

See related Grits posts:

• Most SCOTUS Justices seem inclined to require warrant for GPS tracking
• Whether SCOTUS says GPS tracking is constitutional, markets may decide if it's viable
• Droning on in Montgomery County: Unmanned aircraft could be mounted with weapons
• Is something in plain view if you can only see it by flying a toy helicopter with a camera over my back fence to peer onto my property?
• DPS spending millions on TDEX database while drivers license lines lengthen
• Is the Fourth Amendment dead or just in a coma? Debating when to pull the plug

Big Brother on steroids: License-plate readers, checkpoints, and tracking cars w/o a court order, up Wednesday

There are a ton of nasty-sounding bills up in the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee hearing on Wedesday morning at 7:30 a.m. (see their agenda), but I think SB 9 by Sen. Williams has definitely made it to the short list so far among candidates for my own, personal, "Most Despised Bill of the Session. This legislation:

1. Authorizes drivers license and insurance checkpoints (after the Lege and courts have repeatedly rejected DWI checkpoints, which is what police really want).
2. Authorizes a two-year statewide pilot program of roadside license plate readers with tracking data gathered by a private contractor.
3. Requires police officers in the field to check the immigration status of arrestees with ICE instead of leaving the task to county jails after arrest.
4. Requires county jails to calculate and report every month the cost of the unfunded mandate caused by increased incarceration from #3, above.
5. Changes the duties of "special" Texas Rangers to include background investigations and monitoring sex offenders as well as two man patrols in "high threat areas" (no word if that's the border or central Houston).
6. Increases penalties for organized crime but in certain cases removes the requirement of an "overt act" to establish that someone is part of a criminal conspiracy.

I don't think I agree with anything in this bill after the caption: "relating to homeland security." Sen. Williams and others also have bills on the agenda breaking up each of these individual ideas into their own bills, and there are two other bills up from Democrats Lucio and Hinojosa setting the groundwork for southbound checkpoints by DPS aimed at seizing cash they hope will bolster state coffers through asset forfeiture.

Another billl by Chairman Williams, SB 1694,  would allow law enforcement agencies to put a tracking device on your vehicle without a court order!

There is one promising if modest bill up from my own state Sen. Kirk Watson, SB 1572, limiting the information that can be gathered by fusion centers thusly:

A fusion center may not:
                  
(1)  review, collect, or maintain noncriminal information or criminal intelligence data about the political, religious, or social views, associations, military history, or activities of any individual or any group, association, corporation, business, partnership, or other organization unless the information directly relates to criminal conduct or activity and reasonable suspicion exists that the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct or activity; or

(2)  review, collect, or maintain protected health information, biometric information, or personally identifiable information unless the information directly relates to criminal conduct or activity and reasonable suspicion exists that the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct or activity.

If they passed that bill I might feel (slightly, marginally) less awful about the idea of putting up license plate readers here there and yon, since the only limitation presently in SB 9 is that the data must only be used "for law enforcement." But really I'm hoping most of the Big Brotherish stuff will get rejected, if only because of the fiscal note (which hasn't been released yet) and the local impact of expanding peace officer duties given limited resources. All these checkpoints, the data collection and analysis, the extra immigration-related enforcement and incarceration, all cost money, if the Lege is honest about it, and seems unwise at a point in time when the state needs to scale back its activities, not find new unfunded mandates and gadgetry to waste the taxpayers' money on.

RELATED: See coverage of SB 9 from the Conroe Courier.

Roundup: Assorted facts and heresies

Here are a few disparate items that merit Grits readers attention before I turn mine for the day to college hoops:

Constable pursues truancy make-work to justify staff increase
Usually it's a mistake when the criminal-justice system seeks to solve social problems unrelated to traditional "crime," and that certainly applies to using constables to enforce truancy laws instead of investing in schools until the product they offer is valuable enough to students to make them want to go. Here in Austin, a local constable wants to hire four full-time deputies to enforce truancy laws. This is make-work and another example why I'd prefer constables were simply eliminated or radically scaled back instead of giving them leeway to seek out new missions to justify their anachronistic existence. State Sen. John Whitmire is right that ticketing under criminal laws will never be a true solution for what ails Texas' school system.

DWI supervision on a budget more difficult in age of media hype
The death of a police officer killed by a drunk driver in San Antonio has spawned absurdist commentary in the Alamo City that somehow Texas doesn't "take DWI seriously," when really the situation bemoaned may be attributed to the shortcomings of two decades of unrealistic, media-driven git-tuff efforts that prioritized rhetoric over reality. The driver was already on probation with an ignition interlock mandated for his motorcycle, but he was driving another vehicle he owned. The fact is, so-called "technocorrections" like ignition interlocks or GPS monitoring are not cure-alls. They require substantial investment in human resources to monitor the data generated by the electronics, and cuts to investments in supervision - e.g., proposed elimination of state funding for misdemeanor probation - exacerbate that already serious shortcoming. It doesn't make sense, for example, to expand ignition interlocks to first-time offenders when cases like this one show local departments can't effectively supervise those with interlocks now. Talk is cheap, but rhetoric doesn't pay to supervise high-risk probationers. For that you need probation officers with manageable caseloads. Meanwhile, such rhetorical broadsides fail to address the biggest problem with DWI enforcement in Texas: Declining conviction rates attributable to the so-called Driver Responsibility surcharge. We're arresting more people than ever for DWI, but securing fewer convictions. The House Public Safety Committee has a chance next week to address that problem when it considers legislation by Rep. Leo Berman to abolish the surcharge, but unraveling that public policy mess isn't nearly as sexy, it seems, as shaking one's fist at the devil over the most recent tragedy of the day.

Fewer than 300 graff convictions statewide in 2010
How many graffiti crimes do you suspect are committed in Texas each year? Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands, right? Most of it is never reported to police as a crime, just cleaned up by property owners (or not). But Texas cities spend millions collectively cleaning graffiti at thousands of sites across the state. So how many people do you suppose are convicted of graffiti crimes each year? The answer comes from the Criminal Justice Impact Statement for a recent graffiti enhancement bill (discussed in this Grits post): "In fiscal year 2010, 212 offenders were placed on misdemeanor community supervision, 56 offenders were placed on felony community supervision, and 21 offenders were admitted to prison or state jail." So that's 289 people total convicted and sentenced for graffiti crimes in FY 2010 statewide! And most of them received probation. Two recurring themes on this blog are that criminal penalties can't solve every social problem and that criminal penalty enhancements have little effect on crimes with low clearance rates. Both observations apply in spades to graffiti crimes.

A brief (passing) moment of economic realism on closing the border
People who say the want to "close" or "shut down" the border over immigration, drug smuggling, etc., simply have no clue about the interconnectedness of Texas border economies with Mexico or the astonishing volume of goods and people that travel each direction through the checkpoints. This story from the El Paso Times provides a glimpse of that hidden but critical relationship which a) is growing at a vast rate and b) benefits the United States at least as much as our southern neighbor. The more ideologically driven and detached from business interests calls for immigration enforcement grow, the more explicit this tension will become, but do not doubt that Texas' economy will be harmed if the search for solutions to black markets cause our legal markets to become less competitive or generate fewer jobs. You could never hire enough Border Patrol agents to make up for the economic and employment growth along Texas' southern border over the last decade. Bottom line: One may become frustrated with a goose laying golden eggs, but that won't make it wise to cook it for supper.

Prisoners can pay more if allowed to earn
Here in Texas, legislators have proposed increased prisoner copays for healthcare. In Ohio, the Governor wants prisoners to pay part of their electricity bill. But in Canada, I learned, prisoners are paid minimal wages and charged part of their rent if the take exceeds a certain amount during a pay period. Prisoners in Canada are paid as an "incentive to invite them to actively take part in their rehabilitation." In Canada, prisoners "generally make, before deductions, $35 to $40, every two weeks and that’s for 12 hours a day, generally six days a week," and their advocates are pushing for their first raise in 25 years. Ten percent of their earnings is put in a savings account, but the amounts aren't large enough to be significant upon reentry. The Canadian example struck me as interesting because, whenever prisoner pays ideas are proposed as in Texas and Ohio, I often think they're either trying to get blood from a stone or will wind up mulcting families instead of the person who committed the crime. But if prisoners can earn, it's less problematic to require them to pay. Henry Ford wanted to pay his employees enough where they could buy one of his cars from him, and similarly if states want inmates to help solve their budget crises, it might behoove them to allow inmates to earn more money so they can pay more of the freight.

Army rocked by crime lab scandal
Read about another ugly crime lab scandal, this time from the military courts.

Jury out on effectiveness of faith based prisons
A comprehensive meta-analysis of research regarding the benefits from faith based prisons found, unsurprisingly if unhelpfully, that "based on current research, there’s no strong reason to believe that faith-based prisons work. However, there’s also no strong reason to believe that they don’t work." The author concludes "with thoughts on how faith-based prison programs might be improved, and ... a strategy that would allow such experimentation to proceed consistent with the Constitution." Via Sentencing Law & Policy.

'Outlawed, cell phones are thriving in prison'

The New York Times takes on one of state Sen. John Whitmire's favorite topics with a feature on cell phones in prison with the same title as this post. The article takes a different twist toward the end, however, suggesting that one solution might be to embrace the trend instead of fighting an expensive, losing battle.

The recent rise in smartphones raises larger issues for prisoners and their advocates, who say the phones are not necessarily used for criminal purposes. In some prisons, a traditional phone call is prohibitive, costing $1 per minute in many states. And cellphones can help some offenders stay better connected with their families.

Mike, the Georgia inmate who was part of the recent strike, said he used his to stay in touch with his son.

“When he gets off the school bus, I’m on the phone and I talk to him,” he said in an interview on his contraband cellphone. “When he goes to bed, I’m on the phone and I talk to him.”

Some groups are encouraging prisons to embrace new technology while managing risks. Inmates are more likely to successfully re-enter society if they maintain relationships with friends and families, said David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It shows that even if they are closed institutions, prisons are still part of the larger society,” Mr. Fathi said. “They can’t be forever walled off from technological changes.”

And in a world where hundreds of apps are introduced each day by developers hoping to tap new markets, a pool of prisoners with smartphones can seem an attractive new market, despite the implications.

“It’s a pure business opportunity,” said Hal Goldstein, the publisher of iPhone Life magazine. He predicted that games would be big, but so would the ability to download news and books.

“People outside of prison become addicted to their phones,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Can you imagine if you had nothing but time on your hands?” 

That's a prescient observation and IMO probably where many prisons may head in the future as smart phones become a more ubiquitous part of the culture, though there will be a long slog between  there and here. Most cell phone smuggling is not for nefarious purposes, it's to stay in contact with friends and family. And though it certainly helps to install landlines, as TDCJ has recently done, that's still expensive for families and doesn't include a level of functionality that increasingly young people (who are overrepresented in prisons) have grown accustomed to in ways that, in years past, the television (long a staple in prison common rooms) was the central media experience for prior generations.

It's happening, anyway. Smart phones are being smuggled into prisons in significant numbers. Staff can only catch a fraction, and that number will likely decline if the agency follows through on its plan to cut the number of staff to reduce its budget while keeping open all 112 prison units. Searching for cell phones and other contraband requires warm, uniformed bodies to perform the task. Staff reductions would in all likelihood open the floodgates to contraband smuggling.

Part of the solution could end up being to supply inmates with smart phones so that the state can control the practice - allow them to be checked out for a few hours at a time as an incentive for good behavior, with some sort of specialized, limited, interchangeable (or re-programmable) SIM chip that only allows calls or emails to the handful of people on the inmate's approved visitation list. That would also stop prisoners from passing phones around for use by others (e.g., the phone with which Richard Tabler called state Sen. John Whitmire was apparently also used by many other death row inmates). Let people do games or other Smart-Phonesque activities while the phones are checked out. The phones should record each call, text, email, etc. for downloading when they turn the unit back in.

Right now, TDCJ inmates get no internet access, and most inmate blogs you see are snail mail letters uploaded by family and friends. But I don't see a huge downside to letting prisoners update Facebook, blogs, etc., on the condition that they answer yes to a friend request from a TDCJ monitor authorized to track content (or follow up on reported leads) for improper posting. There'd probably need to be some way to disallow making Facebook friends with fellow prisoners to (rightfully) limit unauthorized prisoner-to-prisoner communication. I'm no computer whiz, but it seems likely a program could be written to track certain keywords, gang references, intra-TDCJ friend requests and other banned content. 

Certainly some people would continue to smuggle cell phones in for nefarious purposes, but reducing the volume would reduce revenue and power of the smuggling networks bringing them in. Beyond that, there would be a huge security payoff: By authorizing controlled access to Smart Phones and limiting their use by limiting their functionality, it would also limit unauthorized uses, such as those that spawned the organizing of a multi-unit prisoner strike in Georgia. Again from the Times: 

The Georgia prison strike, for instance, was about things prisoners often complain about: They are not paid for their labor. Visitation rules are too strict. Meals are bad.

But the technology they used to voice their concerns was new.

Inmates punched in text messages and assembled e-mail lists to coordinate simultaneous protests, including work stoppages, with inmates at other prisons. Under pseudonyms, they shared hour-by-hour updates with followers on Facebook and Twitter. They communicated with their advocates, conducted news media interviews and monitored coverage of the strike.

That's a worst-case security nightmare for prison managers, just a step or two from the coordination of mass escapes of the type recently seen in Nuevo Laredo.

I'm not sure it's possible to keep smart phones and other contraband out of prisons because the demand is great and prisoners have a lot of time on their hands to figure out how to circumvent any security arrangement. If giving limited, monitored smart-phone access as an incentive for good behavior reduced smuggling and the chances such technology would spawn disruption, to me that makes more sense than an enforcement-only approach that, in practice, lets the free black market provide phones in prison to seemingly just about anyone who can pay for one.

Say 'Howdy' to Stockycat

I recently quipped that celebration of the Fourth Amendment is "rather like wearing a Kurt Cobain t-shirt, commemorating something that's dead and anachronistic, however laudable or memorable for those of a certain age who could still recall when it was relevant." Well, somebody out there hopes to prove me wrong. Joshua Engel is a Harvard-educated career prosecutor who recently left a post as chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department of Public Safety and launched a new blog called Stockycat, "Dedicated to the idea that effective law enforcement is not incompatible with a vigorous interpretation of the Fourth Amendment." He's announced he'll focus mainly on its intersection with modern technology.

Engel already has offered up several promising posts. Notably, Can the Police Put a GPS Device on Your Car Without a Warrant?, and If the cops put a GPS device on your car do you have to give it back? Another interesting item discusses a case presently before SCOTUS regarding the Fourth Amendment and child abuse interviews. In yet another post, he provocatively critiques the ACLU from a libertarian stance, wondering if they (and by extension, many others) haven't jumped the gun by ignoring privacy concerns from GPS tracking of offenders (good point: the data be at least protected and at some point destroyed; I have no idea what Texas does on that score). And he questions whether police can search the contents of an abandoned cell phone without a warrant. Good stuff, gimme more! Welcome to the blogosphere, Josh. You've picked an excellent, much-needed niche. Via Doug Berman.

New threats to Whtimire's family punctuate failed TDCJ contraband crackdown; Might cell phone locators work better than jammers?

The death row inmate who called state Sen. John Whtimre and set off last year's scandal about cell phones on prisons didn't get convicted of capital murder because he's a really smart guy.

Somebody has been posting Richard Tabler's letters from prison online and in one of them written in June (no longer on the site), amidst complaints that his mother and sister are being prosecuted for helping him get a cell phone, he issued yet another veiled threat to the family of the Senate Dean, wondering ominously about the wellbeing of Whitmire's ex-wife.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. Dumb to write it, dumb for authorities to let it out of the prison walls, and dumb for whoever is posting Tabler's letters to publish it. The result was another round of media hype and likely even more prosecutorial zeal aimed at his family, as opposed to, say, the prison guards smuggling phones onto death row.

Whitmire and US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison have suggested installing cell phone jammers in state prisons, but that would require an act of Congress and has raised hackles among electronic consumer advocates and first responders who fear interference with emergency frequencies.

During this debate, several observers have suggested cell-phone locators instead of jammers, so I was interested to see this story about a demonstration last week of cell-phone tracking technology in a Maryland prison:

The technology tested Thursday is designed to enable corrections officials to locate and root out contraband cell phones. It differs from cell phone jamming devices that would block signals and render cell phones useless in prison. Federal law now prohibits states from using the jamming devices, and legislation in Congress would change the law to allow states to use them.

The detection equipment demonstrated Thursday by five of the six vendors would not require a change in the law, because their equipment doesn’t interfere with signals. The Federal Communications Commission granted a two-day license to one of the companies, Tecore Networks, because its technology cuts off an unauthorized cell phone call made from within a prison.

“If we can find a way to keep cell phones from being used from within the walls of our prisons to carry out criminal enterprises outside of prisons, I’m for whatever works, so we’ll see,” Gov. Martin O’Malley, who backs the cell phone jamming legislation in Congress, said Thursday.

Maryland has also requested a cell phone jamming demonstration at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center in downtown Baltimore, but the state is still waiting for federal permission to hold it.

Notably, the detection equipment can be implemented right now with no change in the law or permission from anyone. Perhaps the FCC will even grant a waiver to cut off unauthorized calls. Without that capability, the tactic would be much more staff intensive. Still, if it's a priority, it'd be technologically possible to identify and chase down unauthorized cell phone users without blocking legitimate communications.

Either way, TDCJ could implement cell phone locator technology relatively quickly if it can find the funding. Maybe some of the money approved this spring for contraband prevention could be used for that - at least as a pilot on death row. Then there'd be no need to wait for an act of Congress or hammer out user agreements with neighboring entities that may legitimately need to circumvent prison jamming systems.

MORE: From the Statesman, "Prison chief: Slip-up in monitoring Tabler mail."

Neuroscience and the law, now and going forward

Via The Situationist, check out this excellent 10-minute interview with Stanford law prof Hank Greely regarding an issue that's increasingly interested me as a result working as Policy Director for the Innocence Project of Texas: The intersection between law and modern neuroscience.


This is one of the best, brief discussions I've heard of the current status on how modern neuroscience is being used in modern criminal and civil courtrooms and what may be possible in the future.

Greely calls "reckless at this point" (at least) two companies which are already out selling "lie detection" services as potetial expert witnesses using fmri's. But the evidence, he says, at this point does not justify anyone buying such services or admitting it in court.

Along with "pain detection" and "bias detection," however, lie detection is an area where current research is fervently looking for practical applications in the courtroom. Modern neuroscience might also change how courts view insanity defenses, said Greely, though he emphasized that available technology and science doesn't yet necessarily disturb these issues.

If the science is ever perfected, which he emphasizes is a big "if," Greely predicts many other bothersome but interesting Fourth and Fifth Amendment questions facing the courts as a result of evolving neuroscience technology. Good stuff - worth a listen.

MORE: See more on the subject from Baylor Law School's program on Neuroscience and the Law.

Keeping drunks dry through technocorrections?

One of the criminal justice trends I've failed to track as closely on Grits as the subject probably merits is the rise of so-called technocorrections, using technology instead of jails and prisons to monitor offenders in the community. The two most successful technocorrections monitoring solutions so far have arguably been GPS tracking (usually with an ankle monitor) and ignitition interlock devices that require DWI recidivists to blow into a breathalyzer before their car will start.

The latest technocorrections innovation combines the use of an ankle monitor with alcohol detection technology to directly monitor alcohol consumption by a probationer. According to a press release from the vendor (Denver-based Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc.):

The state of Texas is now the largest user of a high-tech, alternative sentencing program that aims to shift the focus from "warehousing" offenders and sanctioning cars to battling what judges call the root cause of the DUI epidemic: the alcohol addiction.

Known as Continuous Alcohol Monitoring (CAM) Programs, the foundation is a high-tech anklet, worn 24/7, that actually tests an offender's sweat every 30 minutes, around the clock, in order to measure for any alcohol consumption. The system, known as SCRAM (Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor), is currently monitoring 1,300 DUI offenders each day in the state of Texas. More than 6,000 offenders have been monitored since Dallas and Tarrant County courts first began to use the system in late 2003. Today, 71 Texas counties have access to the technology, predominantly to monitor drunk drivers. Michigan, with the second largest daily number of SCRAM clients, currently monitors just under 900 offenders statewide each day.

The purpose of the system, according to corrections officials, is to target the high-risk, repeat DUI offenders who are struggling with addiction. "These individuals aren't driving drunk over and over because they want to break the law, they're driving drunk because they have a drinking problem, and when they drink, bad things happen," says Mike Iiams, chairman and CEO of Denver-based Alcohol Monitoring Systems, which manufactures and markets SCRAM to courts in 46 states, including Texas. "Studies show that people drive intoxicated an average of 300 times before they actually get caught," says Iiams. "This isn't just a criminal issue, and it's not an automobile issue. This is an addiction issue."

According to retired Texas District Court Judge Vickers Cunningham, who first began to use SCRAM on high-risk offenders in his Dallas court in 2003, the system's 24/7 testing protocol not only helped him to better manage offenders, it began to have a significant impact on the lives of offenders and their families. "It's easy to lock people up and throw away the key. But all you have to do is look at the repeat offender statistics to know that just wasn't working," says Cunningham, who now works for Dallas-based Recovery Healthcare, which manages the SCRAM program for courts in 50 Texas counties. "What I quickly began to find with alcohol-addicted offenders is that, when you effectively remove alcohol from the equation 24/7, they begin to become productive members of the community. They pay taxes, they work and they support their families. It changes lives." ...

In 2007, citing exorbitant expenditures to build jails and prisons in Texas, with little corresponding improvement in recidivism rates or overcrowding, the Texas legislature approved a paradigm shift in the management of offenders, including the expansion of drug treatment and diversion programs that include alternative monitoring technologies such as SCRAM. The goal is to decrease spending and prison population growth rates, as well as recidivism, which accounts for nearly 40 percent of those convicted each year for drunk driving, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

MADD identifies its 2009 TX Lege agenda

In a Dallas News article ("Texas DWI bills gain support after tragedies," Oct. 2), Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) laid out their Texas legislative agenda for 2009, framing their bills around a tragic case of two newlyweds killed by a drunk driver in Dallas. The group's perennial anti-DWI agenda, which at times appears more like an outright prohibitionist agenda, has crept along achieving solid incremental success for more than two decades, ratcheting up penalties and fines on offenders nearly every biennium whenever the Legislature meets.

Despite MADD's past legislative successes, "Last year, Texas had 1,292 alcohol-impaired driving deaths, more than 100 people greater than California, which ranked second." To put that number in perspective, 1,501 people died of homicide in Texas in 2005, so you're more likely to be murdered in Texas than accidentally killled by a drunk. About twice as many people commit suicide each year in Texas as are killed in alcohol-impared accidents.

In 2009, MADD cites two main agenda items, says the News: roadblocks to check for drunks and installing ignition interlock devices after drivers' first DWI. Said the News:

Texas is one of only 11 states that prohibit sobriety checkpoints – roadblocks set up by law enforcement to test whether drivers have been drinking.

But advocates, who have pushed similar bills for the past 13 years, noted progress last legislative session. The Senate passed a bill in a day that would permit sobriety checkpoints. The bill was left in committee in the House last year, but officials with Rep. Todd Smith, R-Euless, say he will lead sponsorship on it again this session.

Another bill that would have required the installation of a breathalyzer in cars for first-time offenders was left in committee in both the House and Senate last year. But Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, R-Irving, said she intends to strongly push it when the Legislature starts up in January. ...

Few studies have yet been done on ignition interlocks for first-time offenders – the bill was just presented to the legislature last session – but advocates point to a 2001 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that says sobriety checkpoints reduce alcohol fatalities by 20 percent. The goal, they say, is prevention rather than reaction.

Although Texas is one of 10 states that have an ignition interlock device requirement for repeat offenders, Chris Johnson, a member of MADD's Texas state policy committee and vice chairman of its national board of directors, said the current law's wording leaves too much to judicial interpretation.

"There are no legislated set of standards," he said. "A judge can choose interlock or can choose jail. Right now there are quite a few loopholes."

Uriel Perez Palacios, the 22-year-old man charged in the death of Dallas newlyweds German and Erika Clouet, drove while intoxicated on numerous occasions but was not ordered to get a breathalyzer ignition device until after at least three violations. Even then, he did not install the device in his car.

The MADD proposal, on breathalyzers in particular, appears to avoid the crux of the problem, which is that current law puts the cost of a breathalyzer on the probationer instead of having the state pay for the device. So if the offender can't pay, you get situations like the guy who killed the Clouets where even though a court has ordered the device, the offender is still driving around without it.

So, rather than make everyone get such a device after their first offense - a vastly expensive proposal for which even proponents admit there is no evidence-based support - why not leave the requirements as they are and make the state pay for the device instead of the probationer? If that had happened for Uriel Palacios, perhaps the Clouetts might still be with us?

Bottom line: The only way to make sure breathalyzers are always installed is for the state to pay for them. I've never understood why we don't - after all, if the drunk goes to jail, the taxpayers must pay his or her full freight, including room, board, healthcare, etc.. By comparison, the cost of the breathalyzer ignition device is a de minimus one.

As for setting up roadblocks, I've always disliked this idea at more of a gut level than an intellectual one. Back in the days of the Cold War this was an easier argument to make because totalitarianism had a face so we knew what to compare ourselves to. "Can I see your papers, comrade" used to be a joke Americans made about Russian authoritarianism. MADD would have us turn it into the American way of life.

Simply put, to me an attempt to sweep the whole population (or everyone in a given area, like a road, a neighborhood, or the YFZ Ranch) for criminal offenses is repugnant to democratic values and the notion of liberty, no matter how many states have passed the law. I like the idea, a LOT, that the state must have reasonable suspicion before I can be detained.

I'd support a budget item for the state to pay for ignitition interlocks for repeat offenders when judges think they're warranted. I think that approach makes sense without breaking the bank. But I don't approve of MADD's agenda as they've laid it out here and think they'd do more to reduce DWI by expanding use of strong probation like we're seeing done in drug courts.

Dropouts and Crime: Dallas using GPS in pilot truancy program

I've never been a believer that GPS tracking systems are a serious alternative to incarceration in most cases, but for certain offenders they make a lot of sense. The New York Times this morning focuses on the use of GPS to combat juvenile truancy in Dallas, which might just be one of those areas where the technology is worth the bang for the buck ("To curb truancy, Dallas tries electronic monitoring," May 12).

That's because GPS doesn't restrict those wearing it, so it doesn't actually prevent crime. But it can provide metrics for authorities to check on the location of an offender to ensure they're where they're supposed to be, which is exactly what's needed in truancy cases. It's certainly a superior alternative for truants than juvenile detention!

It's nearly a truism that jails and prisons fill up when society's other institutions fail, and two of the biggest crime-generating failures IMO involve our indigent mental health systems and public schools. This blog has focused more in the past on the mental health system's contribution, but here during graduation season, it's worth considering in more depth the role public schools play in contributing to crime, or rather in failing to prepare kids to have and exercise better options.

The group America's Promise, founded by former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell, last month produced a public policy report on the high school dropout crisis (pdf) in America, and even though I knew things were bad, the numbers shocked me:

Powell's group says that one US kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. A chart on page one analyzing high school graduation rates in the '03-'04 school year shows national graduation rates for all students are just 69.9%, but in the 50 largest cities kids graduated at only a 51.8% rate.

Some of this is skewed by race, but in the big picture tens of thousands of kids of all races are poorly served by public schools. Nationally black kids ranked the lowest, graduating at an abominably poor 53.3% rate, while white kids' graduation rate was a still anemic 76.2%.

Dallas ISD has the worst dropout rate in Texas among large cities, according to America's Promise, but all the big Texas cities fell far below the already-abysmal national average:

Dallas: 44.4%
Houston: 54.6%
San Antonio: 51.9%
Austin: 58.2%
Fort Worth: 55.5%

I'd concur with America's Promise that, "If three out of every 10 students in the nation failing to graduate is reason for concern, then the fact that just half of those educated in America’s largest cities are finishing high school truly raises cause for alarm." Even for those who graduate, there's a real question whether US high schools have adequately prepared them for the work force. But in the modern economy, what future awaits the masses of folks who never even complete high school?

Why does this matter for the criminal justice field? Most American kids who drop out of high school have two things in common: They have few marketable skills and have never learned how to work hard. Bottom line: That makes it a lot more likely they wind up selling drugs or burglarizing your house for a living instead of getting a job, paying taxes, etc..

A study produced in 2007 (see chart on p. 19 of the pdf) promoting school choice in Texas calculated that, "Although the chances that any one individual will be incarcerated are small, the probability is more than twice as high for a Texas high school dropout as it is for a Texas high school graduate."

Straight-up illiteracy is a key criminogenic factor. It's long been known, for example, that while dyslexics make up about 10% of students, they make up 30% or more of those in prison.

As far as reducing crime, an even more important subcategory are kids with incarcerated parents, who tend to be 6-8 times more likely than their peers to wind up incarcerated themselves. Making sure those kids stay in school and have real opportunities to succeed might be the single most important contribution society could make to reducing future crime.

Obviously, it should be said, most dropouts don't go on to commit crimes. My own belief is that it's not the diploma per se that makes the difference, but more often influences at home and whether the kid acquired basic reading and math skills before leaving school. (Beyond that, in my experience, for most people their most important learning is either autodidactic or happens on the job.)

It's not really a surprising assertion that illiteracy and ignorance reduce legitimate economic options, or that that uneducated youth are more likely to commit crimes, but when school districts in major Texas cities suffer dropout rates this horrendous, the raw math of the problem becomes overwhelming.

Ignition interlocks a good idea for DWIs, but vendors should be more transparent

I'm a fan of ignition interlock devices for DWI probationers, and think that empirically they're a better solution than incarceration, for many drunk drivers, if the goal is to reduce fatalities. But like Elvez1975 over at You Don't Make Friends With Salad, it gives me pause if the makers of such devices aren't being transparent about their products.

Elvez1975 describes recent efforts by an ignition interlock company to market their devices to himself and other defense attorneys. He then tried to follow up to get more information from the company, but they rebuffed him because they don't give out information to offenders or their representatives, even though probationers must pay for the device themselves as part of their supervision agreement.

For now I'll continue to support these devices based on their empirical safety benefits. Indeed, I think they could be used more broadly if the state would just pay for them, since almost no matter what they cost it's cheaper than incarcerating someone for a multi-year sentence. But when someone's liberty interest is at stake, especially when the probationer's the one paying for the equipment, it's absurd that end users and their lawyers can't get enough information from a vendor to determine if the device is reliable.