Thank you very much. I'd like to thank the committee for giving me the opportunity to speak on this subject.
What I did bring was a two-page summary of the research we did earlier, in the late 1990s. I only brought three copies of the full report because I thought it would bore everyone, and the summary is much better.
As a preface to what I have to say, my major interest, and the interest of our research unit in public safety, is to look at ways of promoting public safety and to do so in a cost-effective manner. That's the general mandate for what we're trying to do.
In the late 1990s, I was involved with a research team that evaluated three electronic monitoring programs in three provinces in this country. It was the largest evaluation of its type, so I have some hands-on experience as to how electronic monitoring works and what we found out about it.
I thought electronic monitoring went off the radar, so to speak, after that report, but obviously it has come to people's attention again. In the last few years, I became involved with a pilot project by the Correctional Service of Canada in which they decided to test out electronic monitoring. I was an adviser on their evaluation committee, so I will make a few comments on that project.
I'd like to give a very quick summary of the evidence. What do we know about the effectiveness of electronic monitoring?
I'm not sure if many of you are aware of the history of electronic monitoring. It was first proposed in 1967 as a way of monitoring juvenile delinquents and also as a way of monitoring people in psychiatric hospitals and other kinds of settings. However, it never got any traction in corrections until 1983 when, so the story goes—and I'm not making this up—a judge in New Mexico was reading a Spider-Man comic book and noticed that the villain had put a tracking device on Spider-Man. That allowed the villain to go somewhere where Spider-Man wasn't. The good old judge thought, “Let's turn it around and put the bracelet on the bad guys, and the good guys will do the monitoring”, and he did that with five offenders.
Since then, electronic monitoring has grown in leaps and bounds. Probably around the world there are hundreds of thousands of people on some form of electronic monitoring. In Canada, seven provinces have electronic monitoring programs. Some are quite small, with fewer than 35 people on electronic monitoring, and some are relatively large. In Ontario, there could be approximately 230 probationers under electronic monitoring.
Generally, electronic monitoring tries to achieve two goals. One is to have it serve as a cost-effective alternative to imprisonment; a cheaper alternative to sending people to prison is to put them under house arrest with a bracelet around their ankle. The second major goal is obviously to reduce recidivism and increase public safety.
What's the evidence on these two matters? First of all, using it as a cost-effective alternative to incarceration assumes that the people you are putting on electronic monitoring are moderate to high-risk offenders who, under normal circumstances, would end up in prison and consume large amounts of money.
Unfortunately, the evidence shows that by and large, many of the people placed on electronic monitoring are low-risk offenders. These are people who would do relatively well without the additional cost of an ankle bracelet and all the monitoring technology behind it. Researchers refer to this as net-widening. You're doing more intervention unnecessarily, catching people in the corrections net who perhaps don't require it. Because you're doing that, you're going to affect costs of corrections.
As an example, let me give you CSC's evaluation of their pilot project. The evaluation report was done in 2009 and covered a one-year period from 2007 to 2008. In that pilot project, 46 offenders were electronically monitored. The cost, depending on what estimate you use—and it's in the report—was up to $1 million, so electronic monitoring is not cheap.
The other point is that we need to look at what the money is really spent on. In the United States, probation is a big area where electronic monitoring is used. The State of California did a study to look at how a probation officer spends his or her time when he or she has electronically monitored offenders; it turned out that 44% of the time was spent on reviewing the records, the printouts from the monitoring devices, and only 12% of the time was spent actually talking and working with the offenders.
Does it reduce recidivism? That's goal number two. In the study that I distributed to you, we evaluated the programs in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland. We found no reductions in recidivism that could be due to electronic monitoring. The only reduction we found at all was in Newfoundland, and this is what Professor Nellis was referring to. It was the only province that paired offender rehabilitation with electronic monitoring. These people had to go to a program four mornings a week for eight weeks--anger management, alcohol abuse, all that. The literature is quite clear that it's rehabilitation programming that reduces recidivism. No other kind of intervention does that, including electronic monitoring.
Now, that's one big study. Marc Renzema and his colleague Evan Mayo-Wilson, in a review of the literature, did what's called a meta-analysis, a quantitative review of the literature. Any of you can go and find one study out there that will support your position. You can find an electronic monitoring study that says it's wonderful, better than sliced bread; well, you need to put it against all the other studies. Winston Churchill drank and smoked and lived to a ripe old age, but doctors will still tell you, on average, not to do that. It's based on quantitative reviews of the literature.
Renzema and Mayo-Wilson reviewed the literature, and it was astounding. They looked at over 2,600 reports. They had criteria as to what to include in their review, and to be included, it had to be an evaluation report. That reduced the number to 119. They had some methodological criteria as well: it couldn't just be any old evaluation; it had to have some level of sophistication. That reduced it even further. They ended up with three high-quality studies to look at. The conclusion was that electronic monitoring had no impact on recidivism.
Robert Lilly called electronic monitoring the correctional commercial enterprise. There is a lot written on electronic monitoring, and much of it comes from industrial sponsors.
When you look at the CSC's evaluation of their pilot project, they also found no decrease in recidivism compared to a matched group that didn't have electronic monitoring.
To summarize and say a few things about where we go from here, is it a less costly alternative to imprisonment? The literature suggests no. Does it reduce recidivism? Once again the answer is no.
I also want to bring to your attention that we sometimes think of technology as being perfect. It is not perfect. There are lots of difficulties with this kind of technology. In Arizona, 70% of the alerts were false alarms. Can you imagine calling the police or sending a probation officer, and how much that would drain resources?
The CSC pilot evaluation also found a high number of false alarms. They even had what's called drift. They were using GPS technology, so you think the guy's here, but in one case he was 70 kilometres in another direction. In a city like Toronto, if he goes into a subway, you pray that he's going to turn up in the right location on that subway line.
Is there a use for electronic monitoring? In the mid-1990s I wrote a paper suggesting that electronic monitoring might be useful in situations where you were encouraging moderate- to high-risk offenders—not low-risk offenders--to get into treatment and stay in treatment.
Treatment can reduce recidivism. Some academics in the U.S. are worried that the growth of electronic monitoring programs will threaten treatment interventions. It's almost as though electronic monitoring will look after everything and we don't have to provide rehabilitation programming any more. I think that's a big mistake.
We need to experiment and look at how we can use electronic monitoring with the higher-risk cases. These are the cases that are more problematic for society. How can we engage them in treatment, keep them in treatment, and maybe use electronic monitoring as another way of encouraging that kind of behaviour?
Thank you.
