ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 23, 1996 TAG: 9602230093
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KERMIT W. SALYER JR.
IT IS CLEAR from recent articles in the newspaper (Feb. 11, Horizon; Feb. 13, editorial ) that the wave of the future is crime, or rather, criminal justice. Even if crime rates remain static, population increase will ensure a steady supply of miscreants who will need to be warehoused.
Do we wish to remain powerless in the face of more incarcerations, building more monuments to failure, a la Gov. George Allen's prison-building program, or is there some new approach, an idea that no one yet has come up with?
It could be that the answer is technology.
While there will always be a need to house the hard-core criminal, we know that jails and prisons are filled to overflowing with nonviolent, petty criminals, many of them snagged in the web of the war on drugs. Rather than cage these minor crooks (except for a brief "shock treatment" for first-time offenders) at outrageous expense to taxpayers, we should allow them the freedom to be productive, tax-paying members of society. With a catch.
We are familiar with the various schemes of house arrest and electronic surveillance occasionally handed down by judges. Though seemingly sophisticated, they are as primitive as a game of Pong when compared with what the future could bring. Looking for spinoffs from the military/industrial complex? Let's start with the Global Positioning Satellite system.
GPS, originally intended for exclusive use by the military (with timing and encryption capabilities necessitated by secrecy) has become the darling of civilian industry. The same timing differentials that were so vital for national security have been developed into a system for determining position down to the meter (Differential GPS), with equipment available to John Q. Public for under $1,000.
Also undergoing phenomenal growth is the cellular telephone industry. We are aware of this growth by the need to change our area code to allow for this expansion. In the future, there will be area code overlays to be used exclusively by such mobile phones - for example, if you live in 540, and must call your wife across town in her Lexus, you would have to use the area code 476.
Why not an overlay code for criminals? With the new communication bill just passed and total deregulation of the industry in the offing, maybe the phone or cable companies will enter the prison business.
If, along with the above two systems, we utilize the information highway, the potential for a new system of justice begins to take shape.
Instead of Virginia Tech holding out its hand for government money to develop a highway to nowhere, it should be looking for funds to begin tying these three disparate technologies into a workable watchdog for the nonviolent offenders among us.
It should not be too difficult to mate a cell phone to a GPS unit, with signals downloaded to a central processing center's banks of video terminals, whose operators would monitor the comings and goings of their 100 or 1,000 charges (however many research determined they could handle). Add a miniature video camera, and you get, if necessary, instant evidence of recidivism.
This would not engender some Orwellian nightmare of the buttocks-implanted microchip variety envisioned by Timothy McVeigh. The option might be voluntary; the inducement would be strong. If you would be watched 24 hours a day, inside or out, who wouldn't, if he could, choose out?
From all of this, any number of scenarios comes to mind. DUI? Your record would be loaded with that information. If your icon on the screen is detected moving faster than, say, 15 miles per hour, your ankle unit would squeal and tell you to pull over to wait for a cop who had been automatically dispatched to track you.
Or, to go a little further, one of the 500 channels of television envisioned for the future could show the geographical area (at any scale - remember the accuracy of the GPS) around your home. If you were awakened by a bump in the night, you could simply tune in the proper channel to see if any malefactor was on your doorstep. Of course, this would work only for established outlaws. Entry-level crime is another problem.
If a business is burglarized over the weekend, the manager could check with the Electro-Penal Technologies memory data base to determine if one of their clients might have been in the neighborhood, although, again, entry-level crime remains a problem. But the money freed from prison construction could be dedicated to education to defuse criminals at the front end.
This scheme doesn't even require a centralized information center. It could be the ultimate job in the work-at-home economy. And the high-tech jobs could be ours.
A network like this will be a part of the future. Only one question remains: Will this wave of the future break on some other shore and pass by our valleys without a ripple, or are there abundant technological jobs available for us, ripe for the picking, to be gathered from the flotsam and jetsam of our society?
No one wants a prison in his back yard - as we've seen in Wythe County - but if such a system, as described, could be developed, there would be no need for any new jails or prisons. And there would be sufficient space in existing facilities for the murderers, rapists and armed thugs that we, as a society, produce.
Those who may have crossed the line without really thinking about the consequences would be able to retain some station in life by serving their time outside of those Institutes of Higher Criminality, and by their taxes help to pay for those incorrigibles on the inside.
Kermit W. Salyer Jr. of Roanoke is on the library staff at Virginia Western Community College.
LENGTH: Medium: 99 linesby CNB