Two summers ago, former public safety minister Stockwell Day came up with a real doozy of a scheme.
He put electronic ankle bracelets on 46 of the toughest ex-cons on parole in Ontario and let them loose in Toronto and later across the province for a year.
The bracelets pointed the parolees’ exact location to a global positioning system based in Nova Scotia.
From there, federal officials would keep track of the criminals to see whether they were getting into trouble or breaking court orders.
Forget about any Charter of Rights and Freedoms issues. That’s never been a problem for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government. Ask Omar Khadr.
After all, GPS bracelets are already in use in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. They work for the most part.
In Sweden and the Netherlands, authorities use so-called anklets instead of jailing people. Florida reserves them for the meanest prisoners of all. In other states, they’re for the meekest offenders, including juveniles and those on house arrest.
On paper, it was quite a scheme. Day was so proud.
The bracelets were part of his government’s tough-on-crime agenda, he said. He could keep track of all of the criminals any time of day or night. Call it total control, a notion that means a lot to the Harper government.
But in practice, the bracelets were a disaster, a costly failure in fact. Nearly $1 million went down the tube.
While the parolees kept their noses clean, the recidivism rate didn’t go up or down. The bracelets didn’t prevent crime, despite the efforts of Correctional Service of Canada staff to watch the GPS screens day and night.
The bracelets were the problem. They were a bust due to bad technology with batteries running down and false alarms going off that scared the monitoring staff while waking parolees up during the night.
“The program was an unmitigated disaster,” said Paul Gendreau, an internationally renowned professor emeritus at the University of New Brunswick and an expert on bracelets.
But CSC commissioner Don Head spins the issue differently as “a learning experience.”
Nevertheless, the bracelets sometimes couldn’t pinpoint a parolee’s exact location. There’s a big difference between being inside a bank at night or being on the street 200 metres away.
Only one of the 46 parolees tried to tamper with his bracelet, but 18 other devices sounded false alarms because of faulty technology. On average, the parolees were getting one false alarm a day.
That’s no fun.
The bracelets had some use. They were good for certain court orders, for example. If a judge said, “Stay away from your ex-wife’s apartment,” the parolee had better not show up on the monitor as being on her front lawn at 2 a.m.
But a GPS isn’t a camera. It just points a cursor to a map. If the judge ordered a child molester to stay away from schools and the parolee happened to be on a bus stopped in front of one, the GPS couldn’t show that the guy was on public transit. What if he was in a taxi stopped at a red light next to the school or stuck behind a stopped school bus?
But if a parolee under court order not to leave Ontario slipped across the provincial border into Quebec, the bracelet would sound off loudly and clearly. Mission accomplished in that case.
The devices should have been good for monitoring curfews.
It’s hard to trick the bracelet on that one. But there were still 12 erroneous curfew violations.
The bracelets were supposed to help parole officers but they ended up creating more problems. For parolees, the uncomfortable devices were a bad, bothersome joke.
They were only useful, they said later, when their families had to reach them in an emergency.
Forty-three of the 46 parolees involved were under court order to avoid “certain persons.” On that score, the bracelets were useless as monitors.
At the same time, 40 were to stay away from drugs. Again, the bracelets were useless; ditto for the 30 ordered to avoid booze.
There were 16 ordered to stay away from “certain places” and 10 who had to “reside at a specific place.” That usually worked well.
The one-year pilot project cost $856,096, which works out to roughly $18,000 a year for each ex-con on the streets again wearing a bracelet.
It would have cost $87,500 for the same time period to keep the same person in a medium-security penitentiary or $65,656 in a halfway house.
So the bracelets were successful in one way: they saved taxpayers a bundle of money by letting prisoners out of jail with the devices. Of course, you’ll never hear Day bragging about letting anybody out of jail.
Richard Cleroux is a freelance reporter and columnist on Parliament Hill. His e-mail address is [email protected].
