Seventh LACCEI Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology (LACCEI’2009)

“Energy and Technology for the Americas: Education, Innovation, Technology and Practice”

June 2-5, 2009, San Cristóbal, Venezuela.

Juvenile Schedule Reinforcement through GPS Cell Phones

Andrew Strelzoff, PhD

The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA,

Tulio Sulbaran, PhD

The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA,

Lacey Duckworth

The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA,

Abstract

Improving academic success of juveniles who have criminal records is a thorny problem. Many young people in this category, despite various afterschool intervention program, boot camps and home arrest monitoring fail to graduate from high school and with continuing criminal activity smoothly transition from the juvenile to the adult justice systems. Studies of this problem have shown that juveniles who are able to maintain a regular schedule of activities have a much better chance of academic achievement and long-term success. This is the motivation behind home arrest systems, which enforce schedule compliance through GPS monitoring. However, traditional GPS monitoring is not widely used for juveniles because of the associated cost and the ungainly ankle box juveniles find unappealing (juveniles regularly choose boot camp rather than wear the stigmatizing ankle bracelet). In addition, GPS monitoring only provides delayed negative reinforcement - there is the threat that non-compliance will result in arrest, which is often delayed until the next contact with law enforcement. This paper describes early efforts to develop a new schedule reinforcement system for juveniles with more immediate positive and negative reinforcement using inexpensive and aesthetically appealing GPS cell phones.

Keywords: Schedule Reinforcement

1.  Introduction

In Mississippi, non-violent juveniles are given the opportunity to participate in an Intensive Supervision Program (House arrest) in order to serve their felony sentence. House arrest occurs in an approved residence within the community of the juvenile’s origin and requires the user to wear an electronic monitoring piece of equipment. Software installed in this equipment is loaded with the allowed and prohibited locations. Typically, the only place a juvenile is allowed to go is back and forth from work, one church service a week, treatment meetings, and medical appointments (Epps, 2007). Enforcement of the house arrest system is left up to the parent/guardian of the juvenile. When a violation is reported, the juvenile is picked up by law enforcement personnel (Harper).

Juveniles who are unable or unwilling to participate in the house arrest system serve a normal sentence in a juvenile corrections facility or “boot camp” (Arnette and Stephens, 2000). Juveniles participating in house arrest programs have a higher success rate of altering their behavior than those who choose not to participate (Geis, 2003). Although the success rate is high, many juveniles do not participate in this alternative to incarceration primarily because of the expenses associated with house arrest monitoing, which most often be borne by the juveniles’ family. For the family of the juvenile under house arrest, the cost for house arrest and other monitoring systems is approximately $1,000 per year (Harper, 2008). Since many juvenile offenders come from low income households, this cost is prohibitive. Other reasons juveniles do not participate include the bulky and unappealing appearance of the GPS device as seen in figure 1. Also, the locality of the offense may prevent the juvenile from participating due to the high costs and required staff time associated with managing the system.

Figure 1: Bulky appearance of the house arrest ankle bracelet (Washington, 2008).

Juveniles are not the only ones who find problems with the current house arrest system. Some previous designed system, such as that of Court Programs, Inc., was not an efficient system as it did not work as intended, due to the failure to report an offense and the money associated with the system. Because some parents do not always report house arrest violations, and the current system does not send a report to the youth court, most offenders are only discovered after being picked up for a different offense(Harper, 2008).

This paper gives an overview of a new approach to juvenile house arrest using GPS enabled BlackBerry cell phones paired with a Bluetooth bracelet. The BlackBerry as seen in figure 2, is the device that monitors the individual and the Bluetooth associates a juvenile with their blackberry.

Figure 2: BlackBerry cell phone.

In Mississippi, there are nearly 152 school districts serving 494,135 students. The current drop-out rate of these students is 26.6% with a truancy rate of 31.8% (Mississippi Department of Education). This means that more than 13,000 students drop-out per year. The warning signs of students dropping out include: bad grades, feeling like they do not “belong”, lack of interest, because their attention span is sustained at school, etc. Those who drop-out are 10 times more likely to be placed in incarceration because for many, as previously stated, house arrest will not be an option (Mississippi Department of Education). In Jones sCounty, MS, the juvenile correction facility can obtain 26 juveniles. Each month, the facility contains approximately 10-12 juveniles, and is full about 2-3 times a year (Harper, 2008).

This paper gives a working design in progress of a proposed alternative to typical house arrest equipment. The following sections describe the design of the system, the status of the system, what remains before the proposed system can be deployed to test subjects, as well as project milestones and obstacles that could arise.

2.  Project Design

The components of the proposed system include a BlackBerry cell phone, software designed specifically for the BlackBerry, a blue tooth bracelet, a registration application, and a database to maintain all necessary information.

The first component, the BlackBerry cell phone, contains the software for monitoring the juvenile to ensure the House Arrest orders are obeyed. The BlackBerry is a user specific device because it contains the juveniles’ daily schedule by including the prohibited and restricted areas, as well as emergency contact information, such as their parole officer and e911 numbers. This information is stored in user-specific software, which is installed in the BlackBerry after the juvenile is registered in the database.

In order to prevent this software from being tampered with by the juvenile, it is software is installed on the BlackBerry as a continuously running executable. Since the purpose of house arrest is to motivate positive behavior, the software also incorporates a reward system. If the house arrest orders are obeyed for a given amount of days specified by the parole officer, the juveniles’ BlackBerry is rewarded points to use for ring tones, images, internet minutes, etc.

In addition to the juveniles’ information, the software also determines if the juvenile is in the correction location from assisted GPS within the phone. The term correct location entails more than the current location of the juvenile as the time constraint on this location has to also be considered. If the juvenile is not obeying the boundaries based on their location, then their parole officer is notified.

To prevent the juvenile from passing the BlackBerry to an acquaintance, the proposed system will be paired with a Bluetooth Bracelet, additions to the software previously discussed. The BlackBerry will constantly be trying to sync with the BlackBerry to make sure they co-exist. If at any point they don’t, an alert message is dispatched to the juveniles’ parole officer.

A juvenile must be registered in the database before being supplied a BlackBerry. This database is responsible for maintaining and storing all data associated with the system. For example, it contains the juveniles’ personal information (name, an ID number, address, schedule, etc.), and the daily tracking information of the juvenile. The interface for the database is a webpage, developed using php, html, and JavaScript. A visual of the current interface can be seen in figure 3.

Figure 3: Visual of the interface for juvenile registration

In order for the system to work as designed, a series of steps must be followed. However, once the juvenile receives the BlackBerry the process becomes cyclic. The steps can be seen in Table 1.

Table 1: Steps for Setting up Proposed House Arrest System

Step / Title
1 / Juvenile is registered in the database
2 / Software is sent to the BlackBerry
3 / Juvenile obtains BlackBerry and Bluetooth bracelet
Juvenile is monitored by GPS unit
3a. / If juvenile obeys rules, points are given
3b. / If juvenile does not obey rules, points are deducted and counselor is notified

Figure 4 also illustrates this cyclic process.

Figure 4: Cyclic process for proposed juvenile tracking system

3.  Project Status

In order to complete the proposed project, four phases have been established. These phases include the following: Project Investigation, which requires initial testing of equipment, survey of current technology and interface with law enforcement, simulation, a study of the effectiveness and properties of the proposed system as it will be deployed, primary development , where major software systems are developed including BlackBerry phone code, server, secondary device interface(Blue Tooth), and pilot deployment, where the system is deployed to test subjects.

In Phase 1, project investigation, a meeting was scheduled with several law enforcement officials in attempt to understand the existing house arrest system as well as determine if the current system could be improved. After concluding the current system required improvement, several pieces of GPS enabled devices were tested, resulting in the selection BlackBerry cell phone. To further confirm the BlackBerry was the correct alternative to the existing system, we met with some law enforcement officials again to present the proposed device.

The next phase, simulation, requires the study of the effectiveness and properties of the proposed system as it will be deployed. In this phase, several tests will be run in order to determine if the system will actually be effective. In other words, will the phone be able to take into consideration the location of the individual against the location stored in the database, determine if the juvenile is in the correct location, and report back to the counselor if a violation occurs? Because there are not enough subjects who can test this proposed system, simulation will give us a better idea if the system works according to the proposed design.

Depending on the results of Phase 2, determines if Phase 3, primary deployment, should be adventured. In this phase is where the BlackBerry code, the server, and the blue tooth band will be programmed to work in unity.

In the last phase, pilot deployment, all proposed components would be combined and subjects would be given the BlackBerry in order to determine if the proposed system works appropriately.

4.  Testing Options

In order to prove that this proposed house arrest system will work adequately, two different forms of testing could be used. The first approach to testing this system is to provide several different subjects who have been registered in the database with a BlackBerry and blue tooth bracelet, gather data from their daily actions, and verify if this system will work as intended. However, this process could take a long time as the number of subjects would have to be on a larger scale in order to prevent the subject who is influencing bad behavior cannot be easily detected.

Due to the amount of time involved in testing with subjects another form of testing, database simulation, would provide quicker results. This form of testing eliminates the amount of time required to monitor and organize actual test subjects. In order to perform simulation testing for our proposed system, several components are required. These components include a database, datasets, database manipulating algorithms, and a front end to the database.

The first component, the database, will be a very simple design. It will have one table which will contain the following attributes (columns): subject ID#, GPS location at time 1, GPS location at time 2, GPS location at time 3 and a flag indicating if the juvenile has violated the parole officer’s orders. In order to populate the tuples (rows) several different methods will be used. First, the subject ID# will be a randomly generated number assigned with the restriction that no two IDs can be repeated. The next GPS attributes will be populated using datasets which are a large collection of data researchers have already collected to perform some type of research and made available to others who need the same information. Datasets are free downloadable resources that can be found on sites such as the South Dakota Department of Education, National Geodetic Survey, and various other accredited sites (South Dakota, 2009. Milbert, 1998). The last attribute, the problem indicator flag, will be randomly generated based upon some conditions. For example, the flag cannot be “turned on” unless two different individuals GPS at time x is equivalent. In addition to this stipulation, another rule has to be implemented in the algorithm which prevents all subjects sharing the same GPS at time x having problems because some subjects can interact without problems, which can complicate the algorithm even more. A possible database setup after being populated can be seen in table 2.

Table 2: Possible database table with hypothetical evaluation of the stipulations previously stated.

ID# / GPS at Time 1 (Lat, Long) / GPS at Time 2 (Lat, Long) / Problem
Occurred
352274 / 31.386999485776037,
-89.36427354812622 / 33.8339199536547,
-88.7255859375 / -
947623 / 33.523078808904195,
-89.05517578125 / 32.27784451498272,
-88.96728515625 / X
296724 / 32.667124733120325,
-88.7255859375 / 31.386999485776037,
-89.36427354812622 / -
503618 / 31.389838694006574,
-89.36553955078125 / 33.523078808904195,
-89.05517578125 / -
103986 / 33.523078808904195,
-89.05517578125 / 33.8339199536547,
-88.7255859375 / X

After the database has been populated, an algorithm will go through database trying to detect problems. If problems occur, the situation will be handled it according to our proposed design. Instead of alerting parole officers through phone calls, we will generate a text based file to list violators of a parole order as well as pertinent information about the individual. This information will then be sent to a testing BlackBerry that will serve the purpose of a parole officer receiving a violation message.