The Department of Corrections is introducing Global Positioning System (GPS) technology for limited uses, following two-year trials that included “live” tests of the equipment involving offenders in the community.
Community Probation & Psychological Services’ General Manager Katrina Casey says GPS is to be used for up to 60 offenders a year to record their whereabouts while employed at large work sites, training institutions, or when they take journeys, for example to attend a funeral.
She says the trials showed the new technology could, in some circumstances, be used to supplement the existing electronic monitoring system, used currently for offenders subject to electronic monitoring. There was no prospect that the GPS technology could be used to replace existing technology, as it was too unreliable. In effect GPS would, in limited situations, replace manual monitoring or expand possible places that can be monitored.
Trials being undertaken in the United Kingdom show the public has an incorrect perception that GPS involves real-time tracking of offenders, and that the monitoring company is able to actively watch the offender via satellite. Neither could, nor will it happen in New Zealand in the short to medium term, Katrina says.
She says both countries have tested GPS as a retrospective monitoring tool only. Offenders need to carry a GPS locator unit when they leave their residence. Their location is transmitted to a unit stored at a central monitoring centre.
In retrospective tracking mode, the information is accessed and analysed over the next day or two. Any abnormalities in movements are relayed to the probation officer, for possible breach action to be taken against the offender.
Katrina says the New Zealand trials have been successful in showing that GPS equipment can help with monitoring offenders in large “inclusion” zones other than their homes – such as if they are working in a construction yard, or if they are undertaking education at a tertiary institution. This means the circumstances in which employment can be approved for offenders subject to electronic monitoring can be expanded.
From October this year, the 20 units bought at a cost of $165,000 for the trials will be used for commitments such as work, education, or compassionate or reintegrative absences, for individual offenders on sentences of home detention, with offenders who have residential conditions on their parole orders, and, also for some offenders on extended supervision orders. Standard electronic monitoring equipment will still be used while the offenders are at their homes.
Meanwhile trials are to continue for Voice Verification Technology (VVT) with the aim of using it in part to monitor a new community detention (electronic curfew) sentence being introduced in October.
Katrina said the VVT trials have so far shown the equipment can confirm identity, but have not proven that it can confirm the telephone number used – and therefore the location of an offender.
She says Corrections will continue to compare research and experience of such new technologies with other corrections’ jurisdictions around the world, including the United Kingdom, to seek the most effective means of monitoring offenders on community-based sentences.
Global Positioning System technology will help Corrections monitor up to 60 community-based offenders a year.
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