Ankle bracelets for criminals scrapped, called ineffective

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This article was published 29/09/2017 (2954 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ankle bracelets work wonders to keep convicted criminals under surveillance on police TV shows, University of Manitoba law Prof. Karen Busby said Friday — in real life, not so well.

“There are a million problems with electronic monitoring,” said Busby, an expert on violence against women who was on a government advisory committee on the topic.

Justice Minister Heather Stefanson told reporters Friday she’s phasing out the last seven ankle bracelets in use in Manitoba because the system is inaccurate and ineffective. The provincial minister said she was acting on that committee’s report to the former NDP government.

“This particular device was not enhancing public safety in Manitoba,” Stefanson said.

Busby said the ankle bracelets can be taken off, tampered with, the battery needs to be recharged every 24 hours, the person being monitored can go out of cellphone range and someone has to be monitoring the system around the clock.

But the worst problem, she said: “It’s not an effective emergency alert.”

“This is not an effective tool, to say to a woman, ‘If he comes to your house, we’ll be there,’” Busby said. “He’s already there.

“It gives you a really false sense of security. They don’t work the way they do on police shows.”

Busby said even if someone is monitoring and sees the person wearing the ankle bracelet has gone to a house where an ex-partner lives, and then dispatches police, “It can’t be fast enough to get there in time, if that’s what you think it does.”

Nor is violence against women limited to the woman’s home, Busby said. An ankle bracelet won’t tell police the person wearing it is approaching a victim elsewhere in an area where they are not forbidden to go.

The ankle bracelets are used primarily for domestic assault cases and to track convicted car thieves.

Regardless of the crime, the person wearing it needs to plug the bracelet into a charger while watching TV or sleeping, she said. “If you forget to charge it, do the police come to your house? That’s a lot of police calls.

“You need to have someone monitoring, sitting in front of a computer — that’s pretty expensive,” Busby said. “They’re apparently not that hard to remove. It will tell you where the bracelet is, not where the person is.”

Stefanson said there are currently four men convicted of domestic violence and three car thieves wearing ankle bracelets among the 8,300 people on probation in Manitoba.

“We will always put public safety first,” the justice minister said.

In half the cases in which ankle bracelets were worn, the person tampered with them or cut them off, Stefanson said.

She would not answer directly when asked whether the problem was with the specific product bought by the NDP, or with all ankle bracelets on the market.

The province will save about $100,000 per year by dropping the ankle bracelets, Stefanson said.

The NDP said it was “going to pass on this one,” without elaborating why it would not comment on the issue.

“The province is doing the smart thing,” said University of Winnipeg criminal justice Prof. Michael Weinrath, director of the Justice Research Institute. “I’ve never been a huge fan of electronic monitoring.”

They’re popular for politicians who want to be seen to be doing something about reducing crime, he said. “It’s sexy, it’s technology, it applies space-age gadgets.”

But studies show it doesn’t reduce recidivism, Weinrath said.

“It’s really more expensive to use than you think,” he said, and requires 24-hour-a-day monitoring, usually by a private company. The more offenders being monitored, the more people to watch them go about their daily business and try to keep track of someone suddenly acting suspiciously, he said.

“The police aren’t going to rush to your home when you rip it off — you’ll be long gone.”

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca