Allegheny County in Pennsylvania has been embarking on a pilot program with the goal of tracking sex offenders. The project was instated by Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala, Jr.
The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency provided Allegheny County with a $282,000 grant to fund the project. A similar GPS tracking program helped track Ronald Robinson, a parolee who shot and killed Penn Hills policeman Michael Crawshaw in December, 2009.
This Pennsylvania GPS tracking program is currently limited to a single school district, Woodland Hills School District in Allegheny County, and only tracks sex offenders in that district. Zappala wants to expand the program to all violent crimes as a part of parole.
GPS tracking is only an option for individuals who are low-risk. “The only use for pretrial electronic monitoring was for people on the edge — people who are low risk. Only the lowest of risk people in the system were granted electronic monitoring,” Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Manning told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on November 15, 2010.
Allegheny County is not the only county that uses this type of tracking. Lehigh County, also in Pennsylvania, currently monitors 90 people.
As other GPS tracking in Pennsylvania counties slowly expands, debates on cost and utility will likely continue. Some, such as Peggy Conway of the Journal of Offender Monitoring, believe that GPS tracking is too expensive to be utilized on a wide scale. Furthermore, she adds, GPS tracking “depends on what [government agencies] are trying to achieve.”
Pennsylvania GPS tracking is expanding, so Allegheny and Lehigh County will be heavily scrutinized as their newly formed programs get off the ground. The empirical data of these programs’ successes and failures will inform future GPS tracking in Pennsylvania government agencies.
Article Written by Greg Minton
