NJ report suggests efficacy of sex offender GPS tracking

Here another boost for technocorrections: a report asserting that “initial data suggests the State Parole Board’s GPS monitoring has contributed to a significantly lower recidivism rate than nationwide data indicates for high-risk sex offenders.”  This line comes from this new document, a “Report on New Jersey’s GPS Monitoring of Sex Offenders” coming from the state’s Parole Board. 

This local media account of the report provides more basics.  Here is a snippet from the account:

Only one out of the state’s 225 worst sex offenders, all being monitored by a new satellite-tracking system, was implicated in a new sex crime over a two-year period, the State Parole Board said Wednesday…. “New Jersey is on the leading edge of this GPS monitoring,” said Parole Board Chairman Peter Barnes Jr., a former Democratic state assemblyman from Middlesex County and a career FBI agent.

The Parole Board said in a written statement that its load of more than 4,300 sex offenders is one of the largest in the nation, comprising almost a third of all cases handled by parole officers. The one offender arrested out of the 225 being monitored was apprehended at the scene of a rape in April 2006. That case is pending. Nineteen other offenders committed technical offenses, such as not properly wearing the GPS device, in the two-year window.

Some related posts on sex offender GPS tracking:

• Is GPS tracking a better way?
• The devil’s in the details of GPS tracking of sex offenders
• More on the pros and cons of GPS tracking
• The practical challenges of sex offender tracking
• New article examining incapacitation innovations
• Are we willing to pay the costs of (effective?) technocorrections like GPS tracking?