DALLAS — After police say a man on parole opened fire in a Dallas hospital, killing two medical workers, the city’s top cop took aim at what he billed a failure of the criminal justice system: ankle monitors.
And he’s not the only one.
Both police and civil rights groups criticize ankle monitors — which provide supervision for some on bond, parole and probation — but research shows they’ve only grown more popular over time. Police say the monitors aren’t enough to keep violent criminals in line, while some researchers and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union say there’s no evidence the ankle monitors are rehabilitative.
Dallas police Chief Eddie García condemned the monitor because the suspected shooter at Methodist Dallas Medical Center — Nestor Hernandez — was a parolee with an active ankle monitor. Police said he’d cut off his monitor earlier this year before Carrollton police found and arrested him.
“A violent individual such as this should not have been on an ankle monitor and should have remained in custody,” García said.
Hernandez, 30, who faces charges of capital murder and aggravated assault of a public servant, had permission to be at the hospital because his girlfriend had their baby. He’s accused of gunning down social worker Jacqueline Ama Pokuaa and nurse Katie Annette Flowers in the hospital’s labor and delivery section. His attorney has declined to comment.
García said ankle monitors are useless on violent criminals and shouldn’t be used as a form of accountability.
“This is a failure of our criminal justice system,” the chief said. “A violent individual such as this should not have been on an ankle monitor and should have remained in custody.”
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot said in a written statement he agrees with García. Most people do comply while on electronic monitoring, Creuzot said, but “we have also seen far too many times someone cut off their monitor and proceed to break the law.” He pointed to the Methodist shooting as an example, adding that despite the ankle monitor, Hernandez allegedly “still carried out an act of violence.”
Nick Hudson, a policy and advocacy strategist for the ACLU of Texas, said courts and prisons increasingly rely on electronic monitoring. But he said research shows electronic monitoring expands the system of incarceration, and restricts people’s liberty, without any meaningful public benefit.
The ACLU released a report this year saying despite how electronic monitoring is billed as a humane alternative to incarceration, authorities and private entities use the devices “like a mobile watchtower” and can watch “where people go and invade their private lives.” Electronic monitoring sets people up to fail, the group wrote, citing multiple studies.
Nationwide, ankle monitors exploded in popularity in the last decade — and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic because of jail overcrowding and court backlogs, NBC News reported last year. More research shows the monitors keep people connected to the prison system “longer than ever,” and even if they may appear preferable to time behind bars, some criminal justice experts argue the ankle monitors don’t address systemic issues that lead to incarceration, the outlet reported.
Even as concerns about the monitors escalate, some who’ve been in the criminal justice system say that doing away with that option could do more harm than good.
“It’s a viable alternative than just incarceration in a prison cell somewhere,” said Steven Phillips, who was convicted in Dallas in 1982 of sex crimes he didn’t commit. Before he was exonerated about 25 years later, he was released on parole with an ankle monitor for eight months. The judge ordered the ankle monitor cut off when he was exonerated in 2008.
Phillips said he set physical boundaries he couldn’t cross, but he had a cell phone and was allowed to work. He typically rode the bus to his job, but he had to strictly follow preapproved paths. When his ankle monitor went off, he said, he had to call to check in with his parole officer, who knew where he was “100% of the time.”
“Any kind of move out of bounds or anything would’ve put me back in,” Phillips said. “Wearing the monitor is not — is not freedom at all. It’s a type of incarceration.”
Although the monitor constantly reinforced how close he was to reincarceration, he said it provides someone with a chance to get their life together. Phillips has struggled with drugs after his exoneration, but he was no longer on parole and was not sent back to prison.
He said it would’ve been easy to cut off the monitor if he’d tried, but authorities are “gonna catch up with you — just like they did Hernandez.”
Hernandez, who served 80% of his 8-year prison sentence for an aggravated robbery conviction in 2015, violated parole twice this year before the deadly shooting at Methodist. The first was for a curfew violation in March; the second, police said, was when he cut off his ankle monitor. Carrollton police arrested him in June, and he was sent back to custody for another 100 days.
Phillips said that what happened with Hernandez shouldn’t prevent others from being released with ankle monitors.
“I think that there’s a place for the monitor,” Phillips said. “And maybe Hernandez wasn’t the right one to be wearing a monitor.”
Criticism of the monitors
The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics reported at the end of 2021 that 3,890,400 adults were on probation or parole in the United States — or about 1 in 66 adult residents. People on probation make up about 80% of that number, but the number of residents on parole has increased in recent years, the bureau said. It’s unclear how many are monitored by GPS or electronic monitoring.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said Monday that 77,439 people are on parole in the state. Of those, 2,025 are on electronic monitoring, while 2,317 are on GPS monitoring.
Amanda Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the prison system, said both types are ankle monitors — they just employ different technology. She said the GPS technology is used for sex offenders and the “highest risk inmates” in a super-intensive supervision program, while the second type is used to monitor compliance with a pre-approved curfew schedule.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles decides whether a person should be placed with electronic monitoring after they’re paroled. The board said in a statement it “considers the totality of information” while making the decision, including the person’s offense, criminal history and input from victims and trial officials. The board said it can also impose a monitor on offenders whose “current behavior may warrant a higher level of supervision.”
Electronic monitoring aims to protect the public, prevent someone from running away and advance rehabilitation, but there’s little evidence it accomplishes “any of those goals,” said Hudson, the strategist for the ACLU of Texas. He said there’s evidence it may have the opposite effect — and could exacerbate systemic harm and impede rehabilitation.
For people who haven’t yet been sentenced, “electronic monitoring really violates that notion that people should be free before trial,” Hudson said, adding it should be reserved for when there is concern the person could be a flight risk or may harm others in the community.
Alternatives, he said, could include a text message reminder system about court dates, reasonable curfews, incentives for participation in employment and educational programs, or requiring someone to remain in the custody of a responsible member of the community who agrees to monitor the person.
“The increasing use of electronic monitoring is very concerning,” Hudson said. “We need to invest in evidence-based crime prevention strategies and not in unproven technologies.”
‘Another chance on the outside’
Hernandez isn’t the only person associated with a high-profile crime recently involving people who cut their ankle monitors.
Last Christmas, two women charged in the slaying of 23-year-old Marisela Botello Valdez removed their ankle monitors while out on bond and were on the run for months, Dallas police said. Authorities arrested Lisa Jo Dykes and Nina Tamar Marano in Cambodia two months later.
Mar Butler, founder of TREE Leadership, a group that helps underserved communities, said those cases shouldn’t overshadow the possible benefits of ankle monitors.
“You’re gonna always have people that cut monitors off, but it’s not going to outnumber the people who have successfully completed it,” Butler said.
Butler spent 10 years — from 2002 to 2012 — in state prison for an aggravated robbery, and has since become a community advocate in numerous organizations that help youth and try to address underlying factors of violent crime, like poverty and lack of education.
When he was released from prison, Butler spent 90 days in a transitional home, which he said “gave him a sense of freedom to a certain degree.” He said he’s heard both success and horror stories from people with ankle monitors, but the majority complete their supervision without a blip.
The monitors offer “another chance on the outside” that’s better than imprisonment, he said, but the system could improve. He said people shouldn’t pay fees for their ankle monitor, and probation and parole officers’ caseloads are usually too big.
More resources should be allocated toward counseling and mentoring groups, Butler said, such as violence interrupter teams and prison reentry programs that are “boots on the ground.”
If Hernandez had been overseen not just by a parole officer, but by someone outside the criminal justice system who knows how to do casework and supervision, the right help could’ve been provided, Butler said.
“The system does not offer effective rehabilitative services,” Butler said. “More effective services — health, mental health, anger management — all these services are more plentiful on the outside. We have to reimagine the scope of our supervision.”
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