Every day at about 5pm, 60-year-old Willard Birts has to find a power outlet. Then he has towait two hours next to it while the battery on his ankle monitor recharges. If he lets the battery drain, or enters San Mateo county, he risks being sent back to jail while he awaits trial.
Birts pays $30 per day – that’s $840 per month – for the privilege of wearing the bulky device. It sucks up all his income, leaving him homeless and sleeping in his Ford Escape in Oakland.
“It’s like a rope around my neck,” he told the Guardian, a cable snaking across the floor from his ankle to the wall. “I can’t get my feet back on the ground.”
The use of GPS ankle monitors in the American criminal justice system is on the rise – up 140% between 2005 and 2015, says the latest data available. The government uses these devices to track the location of individuals to make sure they are complying with the terms of their release, whether that’s being at home every night after a certain time or avoiding specific places. They appear to offer a tantalising alternative to jail and the chance to be with family on the outside.
But wearers described them as digital shackles that deprive them of their liberties in cruel and unexpected ways.
“It pretends to be an alternative to incarceration but it’s actually a form of incarceration,” said James Kilgore, who runs the Challenging E-Carceration project at the Center for Media Justice.
The rules for electronic monitors differ depending on the county and the offence. They are used both pre-trial and during parole and probation. In some cases the county covers the total cost of the technology – after all, it’s saving money on extra beds in prison – while in others fees for the wearer range anywhere from $10 to $35 per day.
Beyond the financial costs, ankle monitors introduce new ways for the wearer – disproportionately, people from impoverished and socially marginalised communities – to end up back in prison.
“The minute you have a device on you you can go back to prison because your bus is late, or the battery dies or there is a power outage,” Kilgore said.
Private companies will sometimes offer their surveillance technology at no cost to cash-strapped counties, instead pushing the cost on to the wearers.
William Edwards, a 38-year-old former office clerk, was made to pay $25 a day to wear a GPS-tracking ankle monitor between January and April 2017.
He had been driving an acquaintance’s car with the owner in the vehicle when police pulled them over in November 2016. Police found drugs in the owner’s bag and a gun in the glove compartment and arrested both men.
Edwards, who suffers from chronic myeloid leukemia, spent December 2016 in Alameda county jail in California, where his health began to deteriorate. He was released on the condition that he wore a GPS monitor.
“You just think about the opportunity of being home with the people who care about you,” he said. “But it was horrible. A living nightmare.”
Although Edwards had no convictions – and the charges were later dropped – he spent months as a prisoner in his own home, constantly harassed for money by LCA, the company that provided the tracking service. LCA demanded to know what his girlfriend earned so they could base their “means-tested” fees on his household income.
“I felt like I was dealing with a mafia loan shark,” he said.
Edwards is using the legal system to fight back. He is part of a class-action lawsuit against LCA and Alameda county, filed in early August, which accuses the county of allowing a private company to make profit-driven decisions about people’s freedoms, denying them due process. It accuses LCA of extorting fees from people through the threat of incarceration, in violation of federal racketeering laws.
The restriction of liberty is a government function, but when that service is provided by a private company there’s no public oversight of decision-making. In the case of LCA there’s no transparency over how it decides the fees to charge nor the techniques it users to ensure people cough up.
“You would never let a public probation officer threaten someone with jail if they can’t pay a fee,” said Phil Telfeyan, the founding director of Equal Justice Under Law, which is bringing the suit. “We’re not going to let a private company do that either.”
LCA declined to comment.
‘These are not silver bullets’
Despite the surge in use of ankle monitors, there’s not much rigorous research to suggest they are effective at preventing people from absconding or re-offending or at keeping the public safe. Some studies have, though, shown they can be useful for ensuring that sex and drug offenders comply with the terms of their parole, such as home confinement orders.
In many cases they add an administrative burden on probation and parole officers who have to deal with thousands of daily alerts, errors and false positives. This “crying wolf” aspect has caused officers to miss or ignore important alerts, meaning the public is lulled into a false sense of security.
In Colorado, a parolee called Evan Ebel cut off his ankle monitor before murdering a Denver pizza delivery man. He then tracked down Colorado’s prisons chief and shot him dead at his home. Parole officers didn’t realise he had gone awol for several days.
In California, the sex offender Phillip Garrido wore a GPS monitor and was visited at his home by parole agents at least twice a month. It took 18 years for agents to discover that he had been keeping Jaycee Dugard captive in his garden, having kidnapped her as a child. During that time Garrido repeatedly raped Dugard, fathering two children.
“These are not silver bullets, these are tools,” said Matthew DeMichele, an RTI International sociologist who specialises in criminal justice.
That hasn’t stopped several states – Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma and Wisconsin – from enacting laws requiring lifetime GPS monitoring of sex offenders, a subsection of the population for whom the public has little sympathy.
Sarah Pickard, 32, is one such sex offender. When she was 21 she had sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old boy and was charged with three counts of statutory rape to which she pleaded guilty.
Pickard was sentenced to a month in prison, five years probation and 50 hours community service. She also had to register as a sex offender and complete a therapy programme.
She has completed her sentence and is now married with two children. Both her therapist and probation officer say she poses no risk to the public. However, like other sex offenders in the state of Missouri, Pickard has to wear a GPS ankle monitor 24 hours a day until she is at least 65, when she has the chance to petition the court for its removal. She was wearing it when she gave birth to her second child.
The device enforces the rules of the sex offender registry, alerting the authorities if Pickard goes near a school or playground. She has special permission to take her own children to their school, but isn’t allowed to go to some parent-teacher events, nor can she take her kids to playgrounds.
The device isn’t waterproof, only water-resistant, which means she can’t swim or bathe. To keep it hidden she avoids shorts or skirts; she’s worn long loose trousers for the last eight years. Because they don’t fit over the bracelet, boots are out of the question too.
“It’s hard to imagine wearing it for 30 more years,” she said. “It’s depressing and upsetting to imagine having that much of my life monitored.”
Reform advocates say that if society believes certain people don’t need to be in jail, the focus should be on rehabilitation and reintegration into the community. Their argument is that money spent on electronic surveillance could otherwise be spent on mental health services, substance abuse treatment and employment support.
“Punitive technology is not addressing the root problems people face and why they end up in prison,” said Kilgore.
Before his most recent arrest, Birts had been getting his life back on track after his release from a “three-strikes” life sentence for a series of crimes including a robbery when he was 18 and possession of marijuana.
In 2013, he set up a mobile car detailing business in Palo Alto. Business was booming until his former partner accused him of domestic violence – charges Birts denies.
He spent 17 months in a correctional facility awaiting trial, during which time he accrued $20,000 of debt, before he was released on the condition he wore the ankle monitor to detect if he entered San Mateo county, where his accuser lives.
He works each day at a grassroots civil rights organisation, All Of Us Or None. In recent weeks he’s been helping to refurbish the company’s new office in North Oakland.
“This is preventing me from paying my bills,” he said, pointing to the plastic box poking out from under his jeans. He could otherwise afford rent and meals, instead of relying on handouts from the church.
“All I want is to live a normal life. I want my past to be my past,” said Birts.
Contact the author: olivia.solon@theguardian.com
