June 6, 1986, a convicted felon in Massachusetts named Willie Horton, who was serving a life sentence without the possibility for parole for murder, was released as part of a weekend furlough program by then governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis who thought the program was a step toward rehabilitation. But Horton did not come back. The following April, he viciously assaulted two people, stole their car and later, after a pursuit, was shot and captured by an officer at the Prince George's County, Maryland, Police Department. He was sentenced to two life sentences plus 85 years. The tragic events became a political fiasco, and Dukakis’s hopes for the presidency ended. The program was abolished in April 1988.
No one wants dangerous criminals on the street, yet ironically the land of the free has the largest prison population in the world. Russia, Mexico, and England combined have a similar population as the U.S., yet have only half as many prisoners. As Jeff Milner, V.P of sales and marketing at Lexington, Kentucky-based Corrisoft notes, some states—Indiana, for example—have made changes to the law and now instead of four classifications of felonies there are six. That could mean more offenders serving their time in the community, and with supervisors already being tasked with monitoring in some cases hundreds of parolees, the questions of safety and recidivism naturally arise.
As Steve Logan, managing director of STOP, LLC explains, about 10 years ago there was a push to find alternatives to incarceration for both low-risk offenders as well as people who are not locked up but still require supervision, particularly sex offenders and gang members. There have been three technological waves of these alternatives.
The first wave was RF, a dual-piece device that did not track the actual offender; it tracked the box he or she was carrying. If that person dropped the box, an alert was sent to the agency. For the agency, it was a lot of work to check up on the person only to find out that he or she was in the bathroom or stepped into the backyard to let the dog out. For the legislature, it was a concern about how comfortable they could feel. Says Logan, “It happened all the time.”
There were a few concerns with RF that were mostly alleviated by the second wave: GPS and cell phones. For low-level offenders—as is largely the policy for use by agencies—there is a cost effective method to monitor offenders. ShadowTrack offers a multi-factor verification system that uses voice biometrics. Among the benefits is that there is no equipment. It is all conducted over the phone whereby they track offenders through GPS and voice recognition and verification. A generally available feature today, it can send instant or scheduled notifications to a probation officer via text message, email, or voice.
Robert Magaletta, CEO and president, points out the benefits to using this technology. It is cost effective because there is no equipment to be used, installed, delivered, or maintained. A smartphone is not needed. Any cell phone from a major carrier is compatible with the technology. For agencies struggling with budget constraints, there is also the option of using the participant pay option, which collects the supervision fees directly from the participant. There is also the convenience of not having the band too loose or too tight, having a reaction to the band, losing it, or getting re-arrested in which case they might throw it away. There is, he points out, also the stigma of wearing a bracelet of anklet.
It begins by the offender acknowledging that they are being tracked and opting into the service with the option of opting out at any time. (ShadowTrack has a contract with all of the cell phone providers.) The way it works is by first using two pings. The first is the GPS ping. The second is the tower ping (cellular triangulation). There are also calls during curfew hours. If a judge says that an offender has to be home between 6pm and 6am, an undisclosed amount of calls will randomly come in. Each call includes verification and a question that the probation officer types into the system, which then converts it to speech. The patented voice verification engine, called ArmorVox,™ can verify the voice and understand what it’s saying without using voice recognition (verification and recognition can be done together). Not only will the engine know what is being said, it will know if it is correct, so if the offender is asked to state, “One, two, three, four” but actually says, “One, two, three, five,” the engine will recognize that the answer was incorrect. ArmorVox is also language, accent, and dialect independent. Dialects, says Magaletta, were among the biggest challenges they faced. Now they can monitor in any language. The biometric technology is very sensitive and can also alert the agency of suspected substance use, and the client can then be ordered to a drug testing facility for confirmation.
Each call offers the offender the option of opting out. When asked how often anyone chooses to opt out of a program that sounds much more preferable than incarceration, Magaletta said, “It’s only happened once, and it was by accident.”
GPS has resolved three of the main issues found in the first wave of community supervision. As Logan says, there was the matter of labor and overtime. In order to ensure that the box was set up at the offender’s house rather than, say, his girlfriend’s, it had to be physically witnessed by the supervisor. There was also the matter of physically checking in as well as the fact that if an offender was late for curfew for an innocuous reason such as being stuck on the bridge in traffic, there was no real way to verify it. With devices such as STOP’s Blu+, an RF replacement that offers limited GPS capabilities, the offender plugs in the box and the GPS will activate and verify that it is indeed where it supposed to be. It also has a check-in function to use during the day. This can be programmed to check in at various times to ensure the offender is at work at noon or at an AA meeting at eight and so forth. The third RF issue is also resolved with devices such as this because it allows on-demand pings so the person monitoring the offender can verify that the person is indeed stuck in traffic on the bridge and not sitting in a bar or in a neighborhood which is off limits.
One might think that the idea of being monitored would be a deterrent for committing another crime, but that is not always the case. With software called Automated Crime Scene Correlation (ACSC) and STOP’s VeriTracks™ system, local counties can set crime data (time, location). It will then be matched with those in the GPS tracking system. Police can program the system to drop the data every night thus matching it to offenders being monitored and turning GPS into a criminal justice system. The benefits are twofold: it can catch criminals—sometimes at the scene—and it can also give innocent people an alibi. The company gives ACSC to law enforcement at no cost. California, notes Logan, has had a great deal of success with it.
If there are people willing to commit crimes while wearing a GPS, there will certainly be people trying to circumvent the device. Wrapping the GPS in foil can block the signal, which is faint to begin with. (It has to be, or else it will interfere with communications.) Something innocent such as walking into a building can lose the signal and create a motion no GPS alert. There are also jammers, which, despite being illegal, can be purchased on Amazon. There is a bit of cat-and-mouse involved in the matter, and STOP has developed the technology so that the device will detect when it is being blocked or if a signal is being jammed. (It detects noise.) GPS is a great tool, notes Logan, but it is a tool. It is not a cure-all for everything.
The third wave, Milner of Corrisoft says, is occurring now. While GPS is a great tool, Corrisoft has taken a holistic approach to community supervision and safety. Their mission is to “re-imagine and redefine the use of technology and services to improve community supervision and the quality of life of those we serve.” (Their motto is “High tech. High touch.”) The AIR Integrated system is designed to make the community supervision process much more efficient for law enforcement and corrections supervisors, and to make available all of the tools an offender will need to truly turn their lives around. This third wave, says Milner, takes the process of monitoring beyond “dots on a map” and focuses on factors such as reentry, employment, and behavioral health. Rather than zeroing in solely on monitoring, the program also focuses on accountability and support.
To do this, he says, “We have to attack where the recidivism pain points are.” Some of those pain points include substance abuse, mental health, employment, education, and housing, and the statistics they cite are striking. More than half of individuals without gainful employment end up re-offending, so “securing jobs for our participants is paramount.” AIR offers their participants customizable job searches and support throughout the search and hiring process. Half of offenders with mental illness are rearrested not for committing crimes, but for not being able to comply with the terms of their probation or parole. AIR includes a treatment program to combat those incidents and get the participant the attention they need. Between a third and half of those released are considered homeless, so Corrisoft works with housing partners to keep participants off the street.
The Supervisor Dashboard is a virtual headquarters built on cloud-based technology. It can be accessed from any computer and supervisors can check on any participant at any time. Supervisors can notify a participant of a drug test, court appearance, or warn them that they are approaching an area in which they are not allowed to be. In fact, the process is being developed that will allow then to conduct a drug test through the phone. From a smartphone, a supervisor can view a participant’s boundary alerts and alert history, participant profiles, participant locations, participant terms, participant movement, set or update calendar events, and correspond with the AIR support call center. This allows the supervisor to be much more proactive, and he or she could call a participant and remind him or her that they have to be at an appearance in 45 minutes, yet they are still half an hour away. They have found, says Milner, that those proactive measures help enormously. For the participant, it feels as if they have someone in their court.
GovLab, a think-tank in the Deloitte Federal practice, wrote in their 2013 Beyond the Bars: A New Model of Virtual Incarceration for Low-Risk-Offenders the way technologies can incorporate important elements of effective programs into more comprehensive systems. Advanced analytics tools are already being used in certain areas. In 2010, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice began using predictive analytics to determine which offenders would most likely reoffend based on such factors as past offenses, gang affiliation, home environment and peer associations. Oregon also uses analytics to match offenders with the programs that have been proven most effective. Says the report, “Using data analytics in this way can help mitigate risk to society from virtual incarceration while pairing offenders with interventions most likely to support their rehabilitation.” The report furthered that even if such a hands-on approach to using mobile technology were to cost as much as 50% more than the most expensive existing monitoring program, it would still cost half of what it does to house, feed and monitor an inmate inside prison walls.
By Michael Grohs, Contributing Editor
No one wants dangerous criminals on the street, yet ironically the land of the free has the largest prison population in the world. Russia, Mexico, and England combined have a similar population as the U.S., yet have only half as many prisoners. As Jeff Milner, V.P of sales and marketing at Lexington, Kentucky-based Corrisoft notes, some states—Indiana, for example—have made changes to the law and now instead of four classifications of felonies there are six. That could mean more offenders serving their time in the community, and with supervisors already being tasked with monitoring in some cases hundreds of parolees, the questions of safety and recidivism naturally arise.
As Steve Logan, managing director of STOP, LLC explains, about 10 years ago there was a push to find alternatives to incarceration for both low-risk offenders as well as people who are not locked up but still require supervision, particularly sex offenders and gang members. There have been three technological waves of these alternatives.
The first wave was RF, a dual-piece device that did not track the actual offender; it tracked the box he or she was carrying. If that person dropped the box, an alert was sent to the agency. For the agency, it was a lot of work to check up on the person only to find out that he or she was in the bathroom or stepped into the backyard to let the dog out. For the legislature, it was a concern about how comfortable they could feel. Says Logan, “It happened all the time.”
There were a few concerns with RF that were mostly alleviated by the second wave: GPS and cell phones. For low-level offenders—as is largely the policy for use by agencies—there is a cost effective method to monitor offenders. ShadowTrack offers a multi-factor verification system that uses voice biometrics. Among the benefits is that there is no equipment. It is all conducted over the phone whereby they track offenders through GPS and voice recognition and verification. A generally available feature today, it can send instant or scheduled notifications to a probation officer via text message, email, or voice.
Robert Magaletta, CEO and president, points out the benefits to using this technology. It is cost effective because there is no equipment to be used, installed, delivered, or maintained. A smartphone is not needed. Any cell phone from a major carrier is compatible with the technology. For agencies struggling with budget constraints, there is also the option of using the participant pay option, which collects the supervision fees directly from the participant. There is also the convenience of not having the band too loose or too tight, having a reaction to the band, losing it, or getting re-arrested in which case they might throw it away. There is, he points out, also the stigma of wearing a bracelet of anklet.
It begins by the offender acknowledging that they are being tracked and opting into the service with the option of opting out at any time. (ShadowTrack has a contract with all of the cell phone providers.) The way it works is by first using two pings. The first is the GPS ping. The second is the tower ping (cellular triangulation). There are also calls during curfew hours. If a judge says that an offender has to be home between 6pm and 6am, an undisclosed amount of calls will randomly come in. Each call includes verification and a question that the probation officer types into the system, which then converts it to speech. The patented voice verification engine, called ArmorVox,™ can verify the voice and understand what it’s saying without using voice recognition (verification and recognition can be done together). Not only will the engine know what is being said, it will know if it is correct, so if the offender is asked to state, “One, two, three, four” but actually says, “One, two, three, five,” the engine will recognize that the answer was incorrect. ArmorVox is also language, accent, and dialect independent. Dialects, says Magaletta, were among the biggest challenges they faced. Now they can monitor in any language. The biometric technology is very sensitive and can also alert the agency of suspected substance use, and the client can then be ordered to a drug testing facility for confirmation.
Each call offers the offender the option of opting out. When asked how often anyone chooses to opt out of a program that sounds much more preferable than incarceration, Magaletta said, “It’s only happened once, and it was by accident.”
GPS has resolved three of the main issues found in the first wave of community supervision. As Logan says, there was the matter of labor and overtime. In order to ensure that the box was set up at the offender’s house rather than, say, his girlfriend’s, it had to be physically witnessed by the supervisor. There was also the matter of physically checking in as well as the fact that if an offender was late for curfew for an innocuous reason such as being stuck on the bridge in traffic, there was no real way to verify it. With devices such as STOP’s Blu+, an RF replacement that offers limited GPS capabilities, the offender plugs in the box and the GPS will activate and verify that it is indeed where it supposed to be. It also has a check-in function to use during the day. This can be programmed to check in at various times to ensure the offender is at work at noon or at an AA meeting at eight and so forth. The third RF issue is also resolved with devices such as this because it allows on-demand pings so the person monitoring the offender can verify that the person is indeed stuck in traffic on the bridge and not sitting in a bar or in a neighborhood which is off limits.
One might think that the idea of being monitored would be a deterrent for committing another crime, but that is not always the case. With software called Automated Crime Scene Correlation (ACSC) and STOP’s VeriTracks™ system, local counties can set crime data (time, location). It will then be matched with those in the GPS tracking system. Police can program the system to drop the data every night thus matching it to offenders being monitored and turning GPS into a criminal justice system. The benefits are twofold: it can catch criminals—sometimes at the scene—and it can also give innocent people an alibi. The company gives ACSC to law enforcement at no cost. California, notes Logan, has had a great deal of success with it.
If there are people willing to commit crimes while wearing a GPS, there will certainly be people trying to circumvent the device. Wrapping the GPS in foil can block the signal, which is faint to begin with. (It has to be, or else it will interfere with communications.) Something innocent such as walking into a building can lose the signal and create a motion no GPS alert. There are also jammers, which, despite being illegal, can be purchased on Amazon. There is a bit of cat-and-mouse involved in the matter, and STOP has developed the technology so that the device will detect when it is being blocked or if a signal is being jammed. (It detects noise.) GPS is a great tool, notes Logan, but it is a tool. It is not a cure-all for everything.
The third wave, Milner of Corrisoft says, is occurring now. While GPS is a great tool, Corrisoft has taken a holistic approach to community supervision and safety. Their mission is to “re-imagine and redefine the use of technology and services to improve community supervision and the quality of life of those we serve.” (Their motto is “High tech. High touch.”) The AIR Integrated system is designed to make the community supervision process much more efficient for law enforcement and corrections supervisors, and to make available all of the tools an offender will need to truly turn their lives around. This third wave, says Milner, takes the process of monitoring beyond “dots on a map” and focuses on factors such as reentry, employment, and behavioral health. Rather than zeroing in solely on monitoring, the program also focuses on accountability and support.
To do this, he says, “We have to attack where the recidivism pain points are.” Some of those pain points include substance abuse, mental health, employment, education, and housing, and the statistics they cite are striking. More than half of individuals without gainful employment end up re-offending, so “securing jobs for our participants is paramount.” AIR offers their participants customizable job searches and support throughout the search and hiring process. Half of offenders with mental illness are rearrested not for committing crimes, but for not being able to comply with the terms of their probation or parole. AIR includes a treatment program to combat those incidents and get the participant the attention they need. Between a third and half of those released are considered homeless, so Corrisoft works with housing partners to keep participants off the street.
The Supervisor Dashboard is a virtual headquarters built on cloud-based technology. It can be accessed from any computer and supervisors can check on any participant at any time. Supervisors can notify a participant of a drug test, court appearance, or warn them that they are approaching an area in which they are not allowed to be. In fact, the process is being developed that will allow then to conduct a drug test through the phone. From a smartphone, a supervisor can view a participant’s boundary alerts and alert history, participant profiles, participant locations, participant terms, participant movement, set or update calendar events, and correspond with the AIR support call center. This allows the supervisor to be much more proactive, and he or she could call a participant and remind him or her that they have to be at an appearance in 45 minutes, yet they are still half an hour away. They have found, says Milner, that those proactive measures help enormously. For the participant, it feels as if they have someone in their court.
GovLab, a think-tank in the Deloitte Federal practice, wrote in their 2013 Beyond the Bars: A New Model of Virtual Incarceration for Low-Risk-Offenders the way technologies can incorporate important elements of effective programs into more comprehensive systems. Advanced analytics tools are already being used in certain areas. In 2010, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice began using predictive analytics to determine which offenders would most likely reoffend based on such factors as past offenses, gang affiliation, home environment and peer associations. Oregon also uses analytics to match offenders with the programs that have been proven most effective. Says the report, “Using data analytics in this way can help mitigate risk to society from virtual incarceration while pairing offenders with interventions most likely to support their rehabilitation.” The report furthered that even if such a hands-on approach to using mobile technology were to cost as much as 50% more than the most expensive existing monitoring program, it would still cost half of what it does to house, feed and monitor an inmate inside prison walls.
By Michael Grohs, Contributing Editor
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