This sounds like a job for the Legislature.
The number of parolees being tracked with ankle monitors in Texas has mushroomed to nearly 3,000 in the last two years. About 600 reside in Harris County. The county also has 150 adult probationers and 32 juvenile probationers with the devices.
But so far the monitors have been far from foolproof.
In the last two years, arrest warrants were issued 632 times for “tamper alerts” involving Texas parolees “after business hours,” the state parole department said.
But this is only a fraction of the total number of alerts. The tally does not include warrants issued for alerts during work hours, nor alerts that did not generate arrest warrants.
Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said a full tally would require a “manual review of all records.” For the same reason, the state could not report how many parolees assigned ankle monitors were charged with new crimes.
It’s a no-brainer to me that TDCJ needs to be tracking that. Ankle monitors for some low-risk inmates seem like a good idea to control prison populations, but only if we can be reasonably sure that they’re working as we intend them to be. Someone needs to file a bill to require TDCJ to keep statistics on this.
As the story notes, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office is now using GPS ankle monitors on some of its prisoners, who work outside the jail. It too is being road-tested as a cost-saving mechanism, which I support. I wanted to know what they were doing to track these prisoners, so I sent an email to Alan Bernstein, the Director of Public Affairs for the HCSO, to ask. This was the response I got:
We’re merely in the testing phase. If judges allow/order certain low-risk inmates to leave jail on a GPS-based monitor, will we keep after-the-fact records on any perimeter violations, especially those in which the inmate committed another crime? I am almost certain we will.
Good to know. TDCJ, it’s time to do something about this.