Tracking sex offenders with GPS - Salon.com

This is an article that EVERYONE needs to read.

For those who know me well, or even at all, it should come as no great surprise that I'm all in favor of putting pedophiles, sex offenders and the guy who broke into my apartment this past summer behind bars. And depending upon the transgression (like the last one), perhaps even for life. However, I am also a BIG fan of the notion that free people are indeed free, and those who have served their time (regardless of the likelihood of recidivism) are free until they commit another crime. Granted, if they commit enough crimes, or egregious enough crimes, then perhaps the 'three strikes and you're out of the game' policy should apply.

So imagine my surprise when I read the above article that informed me that the entire state of California is attempting to retroactively punish all sex offenders by requiring them not only to register, but to don a GPS tracking device, even after they're off parole and discharged to society.

The California measure makes no distinction between habitual offenders at high risk of striking again, worth having their every move tracked electronically once they're out of prison, and the felons who have served their time and present no apparent threat to public safety in the eyes of the court. Just put a GPS device on all of them, voters said, forever.
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But now several states (23) have decided: Why should 24-hour electronic monitoring end with parole? Even after offenders have legally paid their debt to society, the states still want to track their every move, regardless of their risk for recidivism. "We're finding ways to use technology to create what is a permanent deprivation of liberty," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It raises some very important issues about what the state may do to an essentially free person."
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To impose GPS retroactively, the state(s) would have to argue (to the courts) that the device is not a form of punishment. Which is the argument made by [Ernie] Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "It's not a penalty," he says. "It's regulation. If people are already obligated to register, this is just improving the means of ensuring compliance with registration."

Hmm... If its not a penalty, I wonder how [Allen] would feel if the U.S. Government made an argument saying that all U.S. Citizens will be tagged [criminal and otherwise] so we can provide everyone with an alibi the next time Al-Qaeda strikes here.