Watchful Sensor Gives Convicted Offenders 150 Feet of Freedom

A convicted offender is given a 30-day sentence--and will spend it at work and at home. There will be no guard watching the prisoner. Instead, a delicate electronic sensor will monitor the offender’s movements.

Offenders such as this are sentenced under a program begun in San Diego County two months ago to allow some “low-risk” offenders to go to work during the day, while being forbidden to leave home at night.

While under house arrest, an offender’s movements are monitored by an electronic transmitter worn around the ankle. If the offender strays more than 150 feet away, a device hooked up to the home telephone detects the absence and registers this information with a central computer.

Although it may have Orwellian overtones, the use of electronic home surveillance to keep some convicted criminals under house arrest has proven effective at cutting costs and reducing overcrowding at detention centers in areas where it has been tried. One probation official hailed it as “a wave of the future.”

On July 11, the San Diego County Probation Department became the first agency in California to allow some minor offenders, who had been sentenced to work-furlough programs, to spend their evenings at home instead of at a detention center in Southeast San Diego. Although it will not be formally evaluated until January, the home surveillance program appears to be a success.

“So far, so good,” said Ron Barkett, a county probation officer who oversees the work-furlough program. “It seems to be working out well with us.”

Currently, 27 people in the county are serving sentences in their homes averaging 30 days for offenses such as drunk driving, petty theft or second-degree burglary, Barkett said. The program will cover 50 offenders when the probation department receives the necessary equipment, he said.

The greatest advantage of electronic surveillance is its comparative low cost. Incarceration at the county work-furlough center costs the county $28 a day, of which only $15 is covered by fees charged to the criminal, Barkett said. The cost of home surveillance is less than a third of the jail costs, with the entire burden borne by the participant, he said.

The program also has relieved severe overcrowding in the work-furlough program. Before electronic home surveillance was implemented, the list of offenders waiting to get into the program numbered more than 300, Barkett said.

“It sometimes took two or three months before they could get in,” Barkett said. “Now, we can get people in within a week or two of their commitment.”

But while home surveillance has helped streamline operations in the work-furlough program, Barkett said, “the way we’re using the program does not truly affect jail overcrowding.” The program is not appropriate for many inmates serving time for serious offenses.

“We have a fairly stringent screening process,” he said. “We don’t have any sex offenders. We don’t have anybody who’s been heavily involved in drugs or who anybody who has demonstrated a propensity for violence.”

Once in the program, an offender has a water-proof, shock-proof electronic transmitter attached to his ankles by two straps, which can be easily cut with ordinary scissors. However, Barkett said probation officers can easily tell if monitoring equipment is tampered with or removed.

“If (the offenders) were to abuse it, we’d bring them back into custody,” he said. “If they did 20 days in the program and violated it, they’d have to start all over and serve those 20 days in jail.”

Although San Diego County is pioneering the use of electronic home surveillance in California, the equipment has been in use for as long as two years in Florida’s Palm Beach County and Oregon’s Clackamas and Linn counties, where it has also drawn rave reviews.

“We think it’s tremendous,” said Terry Gassaway, director of corrections for Clackamas County, Ore. “It’s not a panacea, but it is a wave of the future. In the next year, I think you’ll see almost every law enforcement agency in the country go to electronics in some manner.”

In Clackamas County, most people convicted of misdemeanors and many nonviolent felons are eligible for house arrest. Gassaway, who placed himself under electronic home surveillance before implementing the program, said house arrest “is definitely punitive . . . it’s no picnic.” He added that electronic surveillance combines the best aspects of incarceration and probation.

“It’s punitive and it accomplishes what we want to do,” he said. “We want the person to be working, paying taxes, supporting his family. And he can’t be doing that in prison.”

Electronic home surveillance was introduced in Palm Beach County in September, 1984, and has proven increasingly popular with both offenders and probation officials, said Beverly Auerbach, director of the in house arrest program for Pride Inc., a private company that handles the county’s probation services.

Between January, 1985, and July of this year, 144 people elected to be placed under house arrest instead of going to jail, saving the county more than $41,000, Auerbach said.

Unlike those in San Diego County, criminals in Palm Beach County who receive home surveillance in lieu of jail time usually have their sentences trebled. However, the longer sentences rarely dissuade minor offenders from asking to do time at home.

“A lot of these people are just scared to death,” Auerbach said. “They’ve never been in jail. They don’t want to go to jail. They don’t want to lose their jobs. They don’t want to be separated from their families.”

Of about 150 people placed under house arrest since Auerbach became director of the program, one cut off the transmitter and nine others were found to have left their homes during unauthorized hours. All of these offenders were arrested and sentenced to additional time in jail, Auerbach said.

The electronic surveillance program in Linn County, Ore., has also had occasional problems with violators.

“We’ve had a few people ‘elope’--cut off the transmitters and take off,” said John Tuthill, supervisor of Linn County’s home probation program. “Of the four that took off, three have been subsequently incarcerated. The other individual is still at large . . . In order for the program to work, there has to be an ineluctable penalty for violators.”

Gassaway said that his program also has had 150 participants, of whom six “flunked” the program, though none actually removed the transmitting equipment. Most of the failures involved drunk driving offenders who consumed alcohol, violating the terms of their sentence.

Cecil Steppe, San Diego County’s chief probation officer, has said that if the home surveillance program proves effective, more work-furlough inmates will be allowed to serve time at home. This will open up more space in the work-furlough center, which will be filled by criminals from the county’s honor camps. The camps will, in turn, have more room for low-risk offenders from the county jail, freeing up county jail beds for hardened criminals.

Such a trend is favored by academicians such as Tom Gitchoff, a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University, who argues that eventually most nonviolent criminals should be incarcerated at home.

“We would tend to do less damage to the offender that way than putting them in a jail environment,” Gitchoff said. “(Low-risk offenders) don’t need to be warehoused in a maximum-security, expensive, dirty old jail.”