The Lighter Side of Electronic Monitoring
History shows the benefits of positive reinforcement for Ankleted-Americans.
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Skinner pioneered the concept of operant conditioning—the idea that behavior could be changed by systematically reinforcing specific actions with positive or negative stimuli. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it pecks a button and it will get quite good at pecking buttons. Give it a shock every time it does, and it will avoid this behavior.
“Our plan was to apply positive reinforcement to juvenile delinquents, but in order to reinforce them when something they were doing was right, we had to get some electronic equipment on them,” Gable explains. Participants carried transmitters that sent radio signals to receivers the Gables had set up around Cambridge, Massachusetts. These receivers relayed the signals to a missile-tracking device the Gables had purchased from a war surplus supplier and displayed the participants’ current positions on a large screen. “This way we knew when they were at work or school or drug treatment, or doing something else they were supposed to be doing,” Gable says.
If the participants went to the places they were supposed to go, they became eligible for prizes in a weekly lottery. For example, one prize involved chauffeuring a participant in a limousine to his job at a gas station “We knew a guy who ran a limo service, and he wasn’t very busy in the mornings. So we arranged for him to pick up one of our kids and take him to work for a week. The kid would get all dressed up, the neighbors would come out, the kid would parade into the limo,” Gable recalls.
The Gables’ system included the ability to measure heart-rates and send messages back and forth in the form of electronic beeps, and they were also envisioning systems that could monitor blood-alcohol levels, brain wave activity, and other physiological data. In 1962, Look magazine published an article on their research efforts. In 1964, Ralph published a book detailing their experiments, Streetcorner Research, and eventually a producer from Universal Pictures bought the rights to the book with the intention of making a movie out of it.
Overall, however, initial public reaction to the Gables’ devices tended to be negative. Electronic monitoring seemed intrusive, operant conditioning too prone toward the sort of applications Anthony Burgess explored in A Clockwork Orange. In 1971, Ralph Gable reportedly announced in a Harvard lecture that he was “no longer even willing to reveal his ideas” about electronic monitoring to others because of the “extreme criticism” to which he’d been subjected.
Nonetheless, the Gable brothers continued to explore the possibilities of electronic monitoring. In the late 1960s, Robert moved to southern California and, in collaboration with a colleague named Richard Bird, developed a monitoring system that featured “a belt-mounted transceiver that was capable of sending and receiving tactile signals.” (That is, it vibrated like today’s cellphones.)
In the 1980s, Ralph experimented with a system that Robert would later liken to “Bluetooth AA.” Relying in part on a computer bulletin board, participants would monitor each other, provide encouragement at key moments, and engage in “planned and unplanned beneficial social interactions” designed to reinforce positive behaviors.
By this time, the approach pioneered by NIMCOS had already gained substantial traction in the corrections world and the general perception of electronic monitoring had been established: It was a virtual jail, an authoritarian tool designed to enforce compliance with whatever rules those under supervision had been directed to follow.
In publications like Federal Probation and the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, however, the Gables stayed true to their vision of a kinder, gentler vision of electronic monitoring—and one, they believed, that would result in greater net benefits to society. “An essential tenet of learning theory is that punishment does not change behavior; it temporarily suppresses it,” they wrote in a 2005 issue of Federal Probation. “A person may conform to rules to avoid punishment, but once the threat of punishment is removed, the original behavior is likely to reoccur.”
A truly effective electronic monitoring system, they suggested, would reward small improvements. To keep participants sufficiently motivated over time, it would offer incentives of varying value for instances of improvement, and award these incentives on a varying schedule. The system would also feature two-way communication and incorporate active interventions designed to prevent potential violations.
Thus, if a participant attends a job-training class, he might be rewarded with a letter of commendation. If he shows up for his drug treatment meeting, he might get free movie tickets. If he gets on a bus and appears to be heading toward the bar where his former partners in crime tend to congregate, other participants in the system might text him in an effort to dissuade him. “With the ubiquity of the connections now, all of the Wi-Fi spots, you could really start to do some positive monitoring,” Gable says.
Rewarding individuals in the course of what is generally considered their punishment is one major reason the Gables’ vision of electronic monitoring has failed to catch on. “I’ve been accused of giving cookies to gang members,” he says.
And yet if the Gables’ vision of electronic monitoring is ever going to have a moment, that moment is now. What is the Internet, after all, except a giant electronic monitoring system issuing positive reinforcement in the form of Facebook “likes,” Twitter retweets, and foursquare badges?
Every day, thousands of people publish information about themselves online—what they weigh, how many miles they ran, how many words of their novel they wrote—in the hope that such transparency, along with the support from friends and strangers it engenders, will reinforce positive behaviors and discourage non-productive ones.
If Facebook had introduced a “Dislike” button instead of the “Like” button, its users would post far less often than they do. If the foursquare app on your smartphone tried to discourage you from checking into certain locations by issuing a tiny shock when you did, how many people would use it?
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I know a few probation officers, both for adult and juvenile offenders. They generally seem to like their home monitoring systems, but I can't imagine what they would think of Gables' ideas of positive reinforcement. That's vastly different from the current concept of just corralling menaces outside of prison and charging them for it.
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"A person may conform to rules to avoid punishment, but once the threat of punishment is removed, the original behavior is likely to reoccur."
Conversely, if the person is conforming to rules to obtain a reward, once the rewards are removed, is the original behavior likely to reoccur? If that's the case, which I think seems likely for the same reasons that the opposite is true, then the positive reinforcement method wouldn't be any more likely to be successful once the monitoring and reward system is removed. So unless you're talking about equipping people with this positive feedback system indefinitely, which is a chilling thought right out of dystopian fiction, how would this be any better or even any different than the monitoring system as it exists today?
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Usually you are such a dumbass. Congratulations, PM.
You can even take your criticism a step farther. People in the "delinquent" program will want to be in the program, for the perks, and so will people who are otherwise law abiding. This sets up a bad incentive. I've never been taken to work in a limo.
However, the plain fact is that government only punishes, it rewards almost nothing except martial bravery in its defense, and even those medals aren't worth much on the open market. I'm not saying pride in great service is unwarranted, just that government's reward is simple recognition.
But I don't see how it is dystopian to say that people without felony convictions get more Social Security than others, and people without felony convictions get "full" Medicare/Medicaid, while others don't get the $100,000 life-saving operation, just their $20 pills. And, in the most anti-libertarian notion of all, people who join their local community center and participate in politics and do all the other things that we want people to do, aren't rewarded with small payments.
I'm not advocating for that, but if someone tried it, I'd pay attention. Heck, I might even move there.
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The trouble with this is that I can't think of any kind of favorable behavior that I would want rewarded by law. I'm thinking about victimful criminals, and what sorts of affirmative acts I'd want to reward them for. For instance, what would you reward a thief for -- an act of charity?! Or movement away from an establishment they'd robbed?
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The device had a range of http://www.vendreshox.com/nike-shox-oz-c-6.html approximately 150 feet. When a person wearing the anklet strayed further than that from the phone jack, the radio signal could no longer reach the receiver and the system would
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Their system positioned electronic monitoring as a tool in the process of positive reinforcement rather than a means of deterrence, a way for individuals to document instances of good behavior. http://www.petwinkel.com/pet-gucci-c-35.html (The Gables’ original surname was Schwitzgebel. They legally changed it in 1982.)
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The revenue-raiser argument is really creepy. It's one thing to free governments of the budgetary burden of punishing people. It's another thing to give them a financial incentive to strip people of their liberty.
Government already has a strong incentive to flex muscles and punish people; turning the budgetary drag into a revenue raiser is not going to discipline the state's misbehavior in this area.
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strips and envisioned a more benevolent application of the Kingpin’s technology. In Love’s estimation, electronic monitoring could help alleviate overcrowded jails while simultaneously allowing individuals convicted of minor offenses http://www.riemeninnl.com/riem-hermes-c-18.html a chance to serve their sentences in a manner that was “less degrading than being confined in prison.
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Thanks