RePath in Pre-Trial
RePath in the Corrections Industry
The cost of incarceration is staggering. More than 4 million people are detained worldwide, with roughly 2.2 million incarcerated in the United States. Federal, state and local governments spent a combined total of $39 billion on incarceration in 2013. The national per day average cost of incarceration was $84.93 per inmate, with costs in some jurisdictions topping an incredible $457 per inmate per day. Unfortunately, per-inmate costs of incarceration are expected to continue to rise given the generalized effects of healthcare costs for both inmates and corrections employees, as well the increased costs to maintain outdated corrections infrastructure.
In an effort to increase public safety, corrections agencies often place offenders under a pretrial or post-conviction supervision programs. However, many offenders are placed on a supervision structure requiring them to report once per month or sometimes less often. Obviously, preventing recidivism is impossible under such a scheme. When a supervising agency is capable of meeting with offenders, those contacts are typically monthly, offering supervisors with minimum data with which to engage the offender. The high recidivism rates nationally continue illustrating that this method is not the most efficient, often rendering higher costs and workloads.
Both government and private judicial entities are turning to monitoring technologies, such as body worn and offender carry devices as alternatives to incarceration. While these options are less costly than incarceration, they still remain expensive by agency standards, ultimately resulting in low usage.
The RePath App
RePath incorporates a smartphone app with a robust officer platform to verify, identity and locate each offender in the system. The platform provides violation rates and trends for individuals and groups of offenders, allowing officers to more effectively manage their resources and efforts. The app can be completely offender-pay, eliminating costs to federal, state and local governments. Since the offender cost is extremely low, jurisdictions can monitor each offender, driving up officer efficiency. Keeping each offender involved on a daily basis is likely to render lower recidivism rates.
Consider the following…
- Electronic monitoring (“EM”) home detention would avert 94.7% of the crimes typically committed by released individuals on probation or parole.
- An estimated 781,383 crimes would be averted annually.
- The social value of an annual reduction in crime, about $481.1 billion, was calculated based on estimates of averted loss to each victim and averted property losses for each crime, coupled with averted costs of incarceration. This is based on average time served per offender for eleven (11) major categories of crime, coupled with averted costs of incarceration when offenders are released early. Adjusted for inflation, incarceration savings discounts add up to an annual rate of 3.5% (since these savings would accrue over time).
- Source: Yeh, S. S. (2015), University of Minnesota, The electronic monitoring paradigm: A proposal for transforming criminal justice in the USA. Laws, 4, 60-81