Intermediate Sanctions in Corrections

CHAPTER 6

– 97 – BACKGROUND Spiderman had possibly met his match; the poor super hero had no idea what his nemesis, the Jackal, had in store for him. Like a number of villains in the popular Spiderman comic series, the Jackal was a professor and an evil one at that. In a fit of sheer brilliance, the Jackal had developed a tracking device and fitted a sedated Spiderman with it (Lee, 1974). Spidey awoke to find his lower forearm encased in the fiendish bracelet. If removed, the device would explode and render Spiderman’s arm useless for life. If left in place, however, it allowed the Jackal to know Spidey’s whereabouts. Spiderman finally defeated the nefarious device and many scholars now attribute the birth of electronic monitoring of criminal offenders to the January 1974 issue of the comic in which Spidey and the Jackal engaged in their technologically enhanced battle. Albuquerque-based judge Jack Love read the comic in 1977 and became convinced that the premise behind the Jackal’s tracking device could work in the corrections field, enabling better monitoring of those ordered into home detention. Satisfied that the idea merited consideration, he sent a memo, a copy of the comic, and a news article about devices used to track cargo and animals to the New Mexico Department of Corrections (U.S. Congress, 1988, p. 34). Possibly because the idea of basing correctional approaches on the adventures of comic CHAPTER 6 Home Confinement with Electronic Monitoring Jon’a F. Meyer INTERMEDIATE SANCTIONS IN CORRECTIONS – 98 – book super heroes was somehow unthinkable, the memo had no effect. When America moved ahead in the international prisons race in the early 1980s, due in part to the War on Drugs, Judge Love thought back to the Spiderman comic and the curious contraption manufactured by the Jackal (U.S. Congress, 1988, p. 34). He was also affected by the bloody Santa Fe prison riot in 1980, to which overcrowding had unfortunately contributed (Renzema, 1992, p. 44). He then asked Michael Goss, an engineer, if he could manufacture such a device and the GOSSlink electronic monitoring device was created. The GOSSlink device shared only cursory similarities to the one created by the Jackal; instead of actually tracking an offender, it could only serve as a mechanical supermonitor to ensure that the wearer stayed within a certain number of feet from a base unit that was installed in the offender’s residence. Instead of blowing up if an offender attempted to remove it, the GOSSlink device, like all of its contemporary cousins, alerted authorities that the wearer had departed from the area to which he was confined. Judge Love was pleased with the device and sentenced the first offender to electronic monitoring in 1983 (Beck & Klein-Saffran, 1990; Berry, 1985, p. 3). Though many credit Stan Lee with the invention of electronic monitoring, a similar device had actually been developed in the early 1960s and patented in 1969 by Harvard psychologist Dr. Ralph Schwitzgebel (Schwitzgebel et al., 1964; Nellis, 1991).1 That mechanism was ahead of its time, however, and does not appear to have ever been used except in academic testing and research. Schwitzgebel’s device was a behavioralist’s dream as it tracked an offender’s travels within certain areas, monitored body functions such as heart rate, and allowed for communication between client and human supervisor, automatically providing many reinforcements to behavior modification. The device was tested on volunteer parolees, mental health patients, and researchers before it was patented (U.S. Congress, 1988, p. 34). Despite Schwitzgebel’s pioneering efforts, however, it appears that electronic monitoring became a viable corrections tool through the Spidermaninspired efforts of Judge Love and his engineer acquaintance, in response to a significant jail overcrowding problem. Home confinement, also called house arrest and home detention, had been in use for some time. It was used internationally, especially in South Africa during the apartheid regime (e.g., Hinds, 1999, p. 268), but it was not implemented in the United States until a 1971 program HOME CONFINEMENT WITH ELECTRONIC MONITORING – 99 – aimed to reduce the negative effects of incarceration on juveniles by sentencing them to home confinement (Renzema, 1992, p. 46). Due in part to the high staff demands to properly supervise at-home prisoners, home confinement was limited to a few small projects, serving juveniles and other special populations. Ensuring that detainees actually adhered to the conditions of their sentences meant...