BALTIMORE — Again embracing technology to fight crime, Gov. Martin O’Malley yesterday proposed a new initiative to keep a better eye on juvenile offenders with satellite monitoring.
The plan calls for attaching Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment to the ankles of about 200 Baltimore offenders. The GPS system would provide faster and better monitoring, so authorities could act quickly to apprehend a juvenile.
“Today, we’re talking about embracing some new technology so that we can do a better job of saving more of our young people from the clutches of the drug gangs and the hit men that are on too many of the corners of our state,” Mr. O’Malley, a Democrat, said at the Baltimore Juvenile Justice Center.
The new equipment is designed to allow authorities to better monitor children who are most at risk of dying in drug violence, Mr. O’Malley said.
It would track young offenders at all times. The technology will enable supervisors to know when an offender is violating the terms of his or her release almost immediately. Most of the youths who would be monitored under the program would be between 13 and 17.
The technology would alert supervisors when an offender goes somewhere in the city where he or she is not supposed to go, a tool that would help keep the offenders away from potential victims.
It’s also designed to help keep the offender safe by letting authorities know if an offender is on a dangerous corner at 2 a.m. and prevent the youth from “becoming another fatality on our state’s streets,” Mr. O’Malley said.
The program would go into effect July 1, if lawmakers keep it in the budget that Mr. O’Malley is scheduled to submit to them later this month.
Mr. O’Malley is putting about $1 million in the fiscal year 2009 budget for the program. On Thursday, the governor announced that he wanted to expand DNA sampling to people arrested for about 15 different crimes, an extension of the state’s current policy of sampling convicted felons.
Currently, the state doesn’t have a way of checking whether a youthful offender with a curfew has been some place he or she wasn’t supposed to be.
“It’s an almost instant real-time notification if there’s any violations that occur,” said Donald DeVore, who heads the state’s Department of Juvenile Services.
It was the second of the governor’s announcements relating to his legislative agenda and budget priorities for the 2008 General Assembly’s session, which began Wednesday.
Mr. O’Malley has long been known for trying to incorporate technology into his policies. When he was mayor of Baltimore, he became known for using a statistics-based program called CitiStat to gather and share information among city departments. He introduced a similar operation for the state when he became governor.
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