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State of Illinois Issues First Report on Electronic Monitoring
For more than two decades, the Illinois Department of Corrections has been using electronic monitoring on people who have finished their state prison sentences.
Throughout that time they have remained totally unaccountable for the impact of this technology. They have not conducted research, issued reports, completed evaluations of this program-until late April of this year. That is when the state Sentencing Policy Advisory Council issued a report which admitted that monitors had “minimal” impact on recidivism and might even increase the likelihood of reincarceration if used on people regarded as “low risk.”
The reason they issued this report was because those of us in the Illinois Coalition to Challenge Electronic Monitoring had supported a bill to eliminate monitoring for people released from the Department of Corrections after serving their sentence. When our bill passed the state assembly and was headed for the Senate, low and behold here comes a report. Since one of our major arguments was that there was no research proving the efficacy of EM, they threw something together to create some evidence. But not even their own in-house researchers could trumpet EM as a success. However, this did contribute to blocking the Senate from voting on the bill. But the Coalition won’t give up that easily.
Below is a link to the report.
