Last week, Doyle was getting hammered for his proposal to release nonviolent inmates early to save money in the budget. Doyle is under fire again this week for a proposal to ease the budget crunch by lessening the post-prison monitoring of some sex offenders.
Doyle's proposal for the 2009-'11 budget would allow Department of Corrections officials to switch some sex offenders' monitoring from ""active,"" which tracks in real time and alerts the state monitoring center immediately if an offender enters a forbidden area (like a school), to ""passive,"" which tracks offenders but only downloads data to the state computer system every 24 hours when the offender manually recharges the portable tracking device. Active tracking costs $8 per day versus $4 per day for passive tracking.
Although we endorsed Doyle's proposal for early inmate release to save money and called for review of the truth-in-sentencing law, this proposal raises several concerns and necessitates clear standards and benchmarks to ensure safety isn't compromised.
One concern this proposal provokes versus the inmate release proposal is the type of criminal receiving lenience. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, the 748 sex offenders mandated for lifetime GPS tracking by 2009-'11 under the sex-offender tracking law are the most egregious offenders, including ""people who raped a child under age 12, those convicted of multiple sex offenses and mentally impaired sex offenders who are no longer in state custody.""
We believe discretion for corrections supervisors is important, and employing blanket punishment policies for criminals is a flawed method that fails to account for malleability in human nature. Not all offenders are the same and many might never commit a crime again following incarceration.
Yet, these are not nonviolent criminals earning early release for good behavior, these are the worst of the worst sex offenders. The active tracking provides immediate updates and enables authorities to prevent another crime, whereas passive tracking holds little preemptive power and merely alerts—whenever the offender decides to recharge the device—of a violation well after its occurrence. Foregoing the preemptive capabilities of active tracking for the reactive system of passive tracking presents a safety gamble—one that could come back to bite Doyle's political career with even one mishap.
It's unclear how many of these offenders will be eligible, but DOC Secretary Rick Raemisch frames the proposal as a common sense measure with little chance of jeopardizing safety. ""If a person behaves themselves, is a model citizen, has changed, has accepted treatment, has followed treatment, treatment's successful and ... he's in the 18th year of supervision, it just makes sense to be more efficient,"" he said.
We agree with the leniency and discretion Raemisch depicts in principle, but given the nature of these offenders' crimes, discretion must be coupled with detailed benchmarks and standards to guide a switch from active to passive monitoring—and these standards should be clearly delineated to the public if the Doyle administration envisions broad support and acceptance of this measure. The criteria Raemisch describes—along with evidence of consistent employment, stable housing and a pro-social support network—provide a solid standard, but Doyle and Raemisch must detail this standard in the actual proposal and not just from their oral assurances.
The money saved could reach the millions under this proposal—not an insignificant amount considering the severity of our budget deficit—but few will remember or care should one of these offenders relapse. We tentatively support this proposal, but concrete guidelines and standards should determine in tandem with supervisor discretion whose tracking is diminished—and the Doyle administration should take pains to communicate these precautions to the citizens of Wisconsin.
