Electronic Tagging - Background

Background

In 1964 Ralph Kirkland Schwitzgebel (family name later shortened to "Gable") headed a research team at Harvard that experimented with a prototype electronic monitoring system. In 1969 he and William S. Hurd were granted patent #3,478,344. Also in 1969, Robert Schwitzgebel ("Gable"), a professor at UCLA and Claremont Graduate University in California, wrote an article in Psychology Today about an FCC-licensed experimental radio station to locate and send two-way radio signals to juvenile offenders. A collection of tagging devices used in the United States between 1970 and 1990, and a summary of their early history, with photographs, is housed at the Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio, USA.

In 1981 writer Tom Stacey took to the British Home Office a proposal for the electronic tagging of offenders to track their movements, or fix a home curfew, using cellular radio telephone technology. Stacey had been briefly imprisoned abroad in his former role as a foreign correspondent and had for several years served as a Prison Visitor in England. He followed his presentation to the Home Office with a letter to The Times (published October 6, 1982) outlining the proposal and his immediate formation of the Offender's Tag Association, composed of electronic scientists, penologists and prominent citizens. The term 'tagging' thus entered the vocabulary in the penal context. In March 1983 the Offender's Tag Association held a national press conference. Later that year, a district court judge, Jack Love, persuaded Michael Goss, a computer salesperson, to develop a system to monitor five offenders in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Judge Love was supposedly inspired to act based upon a storyline in a Spider-Man comic, specifically the newspaper comic strip version where the Kingpin puts an electronic bracelet on the superhero primarily to follow his movements. This was probably the first court-sanctioned use of electronic monitoring.

Until the widespread adoption of cellular and broadband internet networks in the mid-1990s, electronic monitoring devices were typically home-based, dependent on a dedicated land line, and able to report only whether or not the criminal being tracked was remaining at home. This was useful for criminals on work-release, parole, or probation, for example DWI offenders who were allowed to leave home to go to work during daytime hours but had to return home and remain there after a certain time of the evening. More recent technology such as GPS and cellular networks have permitted courts to order more specific restrictions, such as permitting a registered child sex offender to leave his home at any time of day, but alerting authorities if they come within 100 metres of a school, park, or playground.