What’s The Maker Of Post-it Notes Doing In The Ankle Monitor Business? Struggling

Technology glitches are putting people in jail and driving law enforcement crazy.

The law enforce­ment com­mu­ni­ty in Massachussetts had a deal. In 2012 the state entered into a con­tract with the lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­er of elec­tron­ic ankle mon­i­tors, the small GPS devices strapped over the socks of parolees and peo­ple await­ing tri­al to make sure they didn’t skip town or oth­er­wise show up in places they weren’t sup­posed to.

There were prob­lems from the begin­ning, accord­ing to cor­rec­tions offi­cials, offend­ers, and attor­neys. For exam­ple, the bat­tery on the bracelets was prone to dying sud­den­ly and with­out warn­ing. The inter­nal anten­na didn’t always per­form well under­neath cer­tain cloth­ing or in cer­tain build­ings. The devices some­times relayed inac­cu­rate nav­i­ga­tion­al coor­di­nates, leav­ing offend­ers in tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of the con­di­tions of their release. Some offend­ers found them­selves hav­ing to walk out­side in the mid­dle of the night or stand in the mid­dle of a street to estab­lish a satel­lite con­nec­tion and prove to author­i­ties that they were where they were sup­posed to be. A July 2015 arti­cle in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly recount­ed a crim­i­nal defense attorney’s tale of his client’s device show­ing that he had walked across a lake.

What’s unusu­al about this chap­ter in Massachussetts law enforce­ment his­to­ry is not the heavy reliance on ankle mon­i­tors, which are in wide use around the world, or even that there were some glitch­es in the tech­nol­o­gy. What’s espe­cial­ly notable is that the devices them­selves were made by 3M Co. Yes, that 3M. The Post-it Notes and Scotch tape com­pa­ny, a Fortune 100 main­stay with a mar­ket val­ue of $115 bil­lion, is also one of the world’s largest mak­ers of GPS ankle mon­i­tors, a field it entered in 2010.

Corrections agen­cies around the world are des­per­ate for cost-effec­tive alter­na­tives to over­crowd­ed pris­ons, which is why 125,000 peo­ple are being mon­i­tored with ankle devices in the U.S. alone. Peru is con­sid­er­ing putting ankle bracelets on more than 20,000 inmates. In Norway, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security is exam­in­ing the use of ankle mon­i­tors for asy­lum seek­ers. Germany recent­ly passed leg­is­la­tion allow­ing them to be used to track Gefährder, or poten­tial terrorists.

3M’s oper­a­tions and sales in 200 coun­tries have allowed it to draw on deep net­works to win gov­ern­ment con­tracts and move quick­ly into the top ranks of the $6 bil­lion offend­er-mon­i­tor­ing busi­ness, as it’s called. But there’s evi­dence that the company’s reach has at times exceed­ed its tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties, with some­times dis­as­trous results. Parolees and peo­ple await­ing tri­al have been sent to jail because of false vio­la­tion alerts gen­er­at­ed by 3M mon­i­tors; equal­ly trou­bling, author­i­ties are some­times so over­whelmed by alerts that they can’t tell who’s in vio­la­tion and who isn’t. You don’t have to be a cod­dler of crim­i­nals to under­stand that this is a problem.

3M says it’s final­ly got­ten a han­dle on it, but the strug­gle to mas­ter this busi­ness has left the com­pa­ny bruised. The com­pa­ny says it can’t com­ment on spe­cif­ic cas­es in which wear­ers claim their bracelets false­ly placed them in vio­la­tion. In a writ­ten state­ment, it adds, “while many offend­ers vio­lat­ing the terms of their pro­ba­tion claim inno­cence, their guilt, along with the effec­tive­ness of the sys­tem, has been proven in var­i­ous vio­la­tion of parole hear­ings almost every day.”

“We have a great busi­ness and a won­der­ful tech­nol­o­gy,” says Raymond Eby, pub­lic secu­ri­ty busi­ness direc­tor at 3M’s Traffic Safety & Security Division, which over­sees the elec­tron­ic mon­i­tor­ing divi­sion. “But it’s com­pli­cat­ed — it’s prob­a­bly the most com­pli­cat­ed thing that 3M does, to be hon­est with you.”

And also the thing with the high­est human stakes. It’s one thing to turn out sim­ple but inge­nious solu­tions for con­sumers and busi­ness­es. People love you for that. It’s quite anoth­er to be at the cen­ter of mat­ters of pub­lic safe­ty and civ­il lib­er­ties. When peo­ple go to jail with your prod­uct bound to their bod­ies, you attract an entire­ly dif­fer­ent kind of atten­tion. Read more here : https://​www​.bloomberg​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​f​e​a​t​u​r​e​s​/​2​017 – 04-06/what-s-the-mak­er-of-post-it-notes-doing-in-the-ankle-mon­i­tor-busi­ness-strug­gling