Perzel's bill is aimed at people coming out of state prison where you go after you are sentenced to a crime. Some people in Philadelphia's local prison system are serving lesser time (less than 24 months) after being convicted but the majority are there awaiting trial. So the biggest problem for the local prison system with overcrowding comes from people who haven't been convicted of anything yet (and might still be found innocent) but who simply can't make bail. A few are violent offenders who shouldn't be given bail anyway but the majority are people who simply can't afford it. So because they can't afford as pathetically little as $500 for bail or have no collateral for a bail bondsman we hold them for months at the expense of $91 per person to the taxpayers when GPS ankle bracelets cost $15 a day and day reporting or drug courts where the accused awaiting trial have to show up daily and pee in a cup for around $20 a day. So different sides of a somewhat relate problem.

BTW again there was a really good radio show about the local prison overcrowding problem on Radio Times with former Prison Commissioner Leon King. Well worth a listen.
http://www.whyy.org/rameta/RT/2007/RT20071029_20.ram

And this about the Nutter administration looking at GPS anklets.
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/loca...med_jails.html

__________________
Barack Obama on security, Iraq and Afghanistan. We need a Commander in Chief who knows the differences between Shii'a and Sunni.

I think we need to build a new prison, I know this statement is obvious, but I am wondering why it isn't being discussed. Is it just too much money? I am never in favor of bonds being issued, but in this case I would be for it. Have any politicians brought this up?

__________________
"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." —George Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 13, 2001

Can you give us a possible location on where we should build it, or should we just take that for granted?

__________________
"I'll vote for him if he's the nominee, but I'll continue to think he's a complete phoney." BrooklynCat 3/23
http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/pol...r-race-11.html

That is so lame, right out of the "obnoxious Obama supporter" playbook 3/17
http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/pol...r-race-37.html
RE-ELECT DAVID OH COUNCIL AT LARGE 2011

A huge amount of theft that goes on in the city is drug-related. Drugs are expensive because the price is kept artificially high... but the War on Drugs (sidebar: I think somewhere back in the 80's, Bloom County ran a cartoon where a drug lord gives Opus a huge sum of money to keep drugs illegal to keep his profits up).

Legalize drugs, tax them, and the price will still drop drastically, as all the current drugs are extremely cheap to produce. Lower the price, and addicts no longer have to steal (or steal as much) to support their habits.

Personally, I'm for a complete end to the War on Drugs, but I don't think all drugs should be easily available. For drugs like heroin, I would recommend a registration program. But I don't think the end of drug prohibition will lead to the vast increase in addiction that some predict; the end of alcohol prohibition didn't turn us into a nation of alcoholics; we already were one.

Pretty clearly its a bad return on the tax payers money to just keep pumping money into housing and feeding people simpy waiting for trial. Jail is a lousy way to force drug compliance for people awaiting trial when people who qualify can still be working day jobs while still being forced to pee in a cup on a daily basis. Instead we foot the bill for months of feeding and housing due to the backed up court system, folks loose their jobs and miss their childcare payments, and still end up walking when they finally do go to trial. Lousy idea if you ask me.

__________________
Barack Obama on security, Iraq and Afghanistan. We need a Commander in Chief who knows the differences between Shii'a and Sunni.

My guess is that there are more people then we realize who think that at the very least marijuana should be legalized or decriminalized for possession. However, I don't think any politicians would be willing to broach the subject. It would make a nice question for one of the debates and would be far more interesting then why a candidate doesn't wear a flag pin.

__________________
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBX5r...eature=related

Enjoy a clip from Faulty Towers

Yes, this GPS monitoring could save lots of $$, but as DA Lynn Abraham said, they really need to be careful of who they offer this "freedom" to.

What type of "criminal" or alleged criminal would qualify for this type of monitoring?

Hookers? Drug users? Robbers? Aggravated assaults?

[quote=seand;784290]


And this about the Nutter administration looking at GPS anklets.



Posted on Thu, May. 29, 2008


City eyes 'virtual' prisons to help clear jammed jails

By DANA DiFILIPPO
Philadelphia Daily News
difilid@phillynews.com 215-854-5934
By the fall, hundreds of convicted criminals could get sprung from Philadelphia's crowded jails and instead be under the "virtual lockdown" of a global positioning system.
But instead of a guardian angel crooning advice into their ears, a voice barking orders from their ankle - like a modern-day version of Maxwell Smart's shoe phone - would scold offenders who ventured someplace forbidden.
That's the vision of Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison, who plans to have a pilot program in place this fall in which more than 200 offenders would wear GPS-tracking anklets embedded with two-way speakers so that guards could immediately detect wayward wearers - and warn them to quit their wrongdoing or risk returning to jail.
The program would alleviate crowding in the city's jammed jails by removing nonviolent inmates, already sentenced for misdemeanors and "light felonies," and hooking them up to the GPS trackers, Gillison said.
Only one-fifth of the 9,300 inmates in city jails are there for violent offenses, a recent study found. About 37 percent of them already have been sentenced, prisons spokesman Robert Eskind said.
GPS monitoring also would save money, Gillison said. Inmates cost the city about $91 a day; Gillison estimates that GPS monitoring would cost $9 to $18 per day, per offender.
"You can't just lock people up and throw away the key; that mentality has pervaded our criminal-justice system for too long," said Gillison, who also is exploring alternatives like day-reporting, which would allow low-risk participants to be employed.
Gillison, Mayor Nutter's public-safety chief, has been meeting with companies offering the GPS technology and plans to put the plan out for bid soon. Not all companies include the speakers - which use cellular technology - with the GPS trackers.
About 800 offenders in Philadelphia already are electronically monitored, Court Administrator Dave Lawrence said. Under electronic monitoring, authorities know when offenders venture beyond defined areas.
The GPS technology allows authorities to know where offenders are at all times.
That capability has some critics questioning whether the technology is too Orwellian. Others worry that offenders might become temporarily impossible to track if they pass through "dead zones" unreachable by the satellite technology.
District Attorney Lynne Abraham said yesterday that she hadn't seen Gillison's plan but that it needs "a lot of discussion."
Such discussion, she said, should include making sure that a fair and adequate assessment is in place to determine who qualifies for GPS tracking and ensuring enforcement so that violators return to jail.
A prison also cannot overrule a court order, Abraham added, so Gillison's plan couldn't allow the release of inmates deemed serious offenders and sentenced to incarceration.
"Public safety is our overarching concern," she said. "Nobody who's smoking a joint goes to prison. These people [jail inmates] are candidates who create certain concerns for public safety."
Such concerns haven't stopped more than 350 jurisdictions nationwide from contracting with Utah-based SecureAlert, said Peter Derrick, a company spokesman.
In perhaps the device's most famous application, authorities last year used one to monitor the post-arrest movements of former astronaut Lisa Nowak, who was accused of driving across country and of donning a disguise in an ill-fated plot in February 2007 to kidnap and kill her perceived rival in a reported love triangle. The case remains unresolved. Derrick said SecureAlert is the only company offering the speaker technology.
It also frees up corrections personnel, because offenders' movements are tracked by Secure-Alert staffers who notify local authorities if violations occur, Derrick said.
One prisoners' advocate applauded the technology as a positive alternative to incarceration.
"There are a number of viable alternatives to locking somebody into a hard cell, and GPS is one," said Bill DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society. "We've been resistant to using some of these alternatives, for fear of being perceived as being soft on crime. But instead, they're a very smart way to deal with this growing and very costly problem [of crowded prisons]."

__________________
United we stand. Divided we fall.