New research, which looks at four decades of state data for electronic monitoring of probationers, concludes that those defendants who received electronic monitoring and GPS tracking were “significantly more likely" to fail to complete their term of supervision. The authors, Jeffrey Bouffard and H. Daniel Butler, from the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Iowa State University, published the paper in a fairly new journal, Corrections, as part of a special issue focused on alternatives to incarceration.
The data analyzed for the study included probation cases over a 40-year time span in a midwestern state. The results showed that when probationers on tradition probation were compared to those put on electronic monitoring, especially with GPS, they were more likely to fail, because the EM spurred many minor technical violations. Their resulting data revealed “sizable increases in the risk of unsuccessful case outcomes by those supervised with EM/GPS.”
The authors suggest that courts and probation staff need to look at technical violations differently, to either provide programming paired with EM or deal with minor, technical violations in a way that does not derail probation success.
As prisons have tried to reduce the crowding that resulted from the “Get Tough” era of the 1970s and 1980s, correctional systems have increasingly turned to alternatives such electronic monitoring (EM), which has seen enormous growth since the 1990s. Though the technology was first used mostly with lower-risk offenders, EM monitoring is now used for more serious offenders, including those who are charged with sex offenses and high-risk violent crime, where its use has been associated with relatively low levels of new offenses, according to previous studies of EM, which mostly concentrated on new offenses.
In 2021, roughly 250,000 adults were supervised by the criminal-justice system through EM. In the state dataset used for the study, probationers spent an average of 604 days being supervised; most were white men in their mid-30s who had a high school diploma/GED and were employed throughout their probation.
The Iowa State study did not look at new crimes, only failing to complete the term of probation, so it’s difficult to reach "public safety" conclusions merely through this study. Instead, the authors looked at the levels of probation failure, which can lead to revocation and the incarceration of the supervised individual – exactly the outcome that the use of EM was meant to avoid.