Should Sexual offenders Be Tracked Using Gps?

Preventing sexual predators from attacking innocent children has been a huge dilemma for many U.S. citizens. First U.S. Citizens passed laws requiring all sex offenders convicted of a crime to register each year with the local authorizes on their where abouts. Next, citizens passed Megan's law, which allowed authorities to post names, addresses, and pictures of those registered sex offenders online; allowing anybody to view sex offenders in their neighborhood. The state of California took it to the next level. Proposition 83, also known as Jessica's Law, after a nine year old girl was kidnapped from her home, sexually abused and murdered by a registered sex offender, passed with seventy percent vote to ban all sex offenders to live within two thousands feet of a park, school, or mall. Jessica's Law would also require all felony sex offenders to wear a GPS tracking device for life. This proposition that was overwhelmingly accepted by voters has its problems. Fastening GPS devices to registered sex offenders might make the public feel safer, it would cost taxpayers millions of dollars annually, and do little to protect children from such attacks.

The first flaw is the issue with the GPS ankle bracelets that all sex offenders will be required to wear. In order to track sex offenders, the GPS devices needs to be charged nightly. If an offender is determined to evade the law, they could simply let the battery run down or even cut it off. "Its really naive to think that this is going to solve the problem." Attorney Stein states. "GPS devices can be easily removed," he says, " they're not encased in kryptonite." Even the device sometimes fails. GPS technology is not effective in indoor places like a large mall, building or stadium, or outdoors in a canyon like environment.

Secondly, the cost accounted worth Proposition 83 is a concern. The cost to monitor all felony sex offenders in California is staggering. Pro Tech, a leading company who offer GPS tracking, changes about 7 dollars a day per sex offender. With about 90,000 sex offenders, Californians can expect to pay about 613,000 thousand dollars a day or about 230 million dollars annually. That cost is only for the current convicted sex offenders. With an estimated eight thousand new sex offenders a year, Californians could be paying half a billion a year in less then ten years.

Lastly, attaching GPS devices to known sex offenders will have little impact on preventing sexual attacks. California's own sex offender registry web site, http://www.meganslaw.ca.gov/, states ninety percent of child victims know their attacker and almost half the time their attacker is a family member. "The vast majority of