Between August 2024 and May 2026, three separate murder suspects in Texas removed their court-ordered GPS ankle monitors and disappeared. One fled the country. One hid under his grandmother’s floorboards for a month. One killed someone else during the 103 days he spent as a fugitive. These are not edge cases. They represent a systemic […]
Two events this week crystallized the central tension defining criminal justice technology in 2026. Cook County’s Board of Commissioners is weighing a $1.12 million contract with BriefCam — a Canon-owned AI video analytics platform — to deploy automated surveillance at one of America’s largest jails. Simultaneously, RAND released its AI Taxonomy for Criminal Justice for […]
A survivor in a basement apartment checks her phone for the third time tonight. No alerts — but that might mean the system is working, or it might mean her ex-husband found a cellular dead zone three blocks away and is approaching undetected. For her, the difference between those two scenarios is the difference between […]
A federal judge in the Southern District of Texas issues a standing order requiring attorneys to certify that no AI-generated content in their filings was used without human verification. Across the Atlantic, the Law Society of New South Wales convenes its most intensely debated panel in years on AI adoption. Meanwhile, legal scholars at Lawfare […]
A probation officer reviews a caseload of 80 offenders. Each one generates a GPS fix every five minutes—that is 1,152 data points per person per day, or 92,160 across the caseload. Scroll through any monitoring dashboard and the problem is obvious: thousands of dots moving across a map, but no narrative, no pattern, no intelligence. […]
By Kevin Zhao, Senior Product Manager — CO-EYE / REFINE Technology Between March and April 2026, a cluster of GPS ankle bracelet escape incidents across Pennsylvania, Texas, Oregon, and Colorado made national headlines. In each case, the pattern was disturbingly similar: a supervised individual cut or destroyed their GPS ankle bracelet and walked away — […]
By JR Rodrigues, Technical Advisor — REFINE Technology The electronic monitoring industry is seeing a quiet but significant shift toward wrist-worn tracking devices. Sold as “more discreet,” “less stigmatizing,” and “consumer-friendly,” these wristband-style GPS and BLE monitoring devices are marketed to agencies looking for lighter-touch supervision options. There is genuine appeal in a device that […]
By Kevin Zhao, Senior Product Manager — CO-EYE / REFINE Technology There is a specification line in GPS ankle monitor procurement that separates equipment built for criminal justice from equipment repurposed from consumer GPS trackers. That line is IP68 waterproof protection — and crossing to the wrong side of it will destroy your program’s reliability […]
By JR Rodrigues, Technical Advisor — REFINE Technology Every GPS ankle bracelet generates alerts. Some of those alerts represent genuine threats — a cut strap, a defendant fleeing the jurisdiction, a curfew violation. But a troubling percentage of alerts generated by electronic monitoring systems are false alarms — triggered by sweat, skin dryness, physical activity, […]
By Kevin Zhao, Senior Product Manager, REFINE Technology I spent last week reading through hundreds of Reddit posts, Quora threads, and public forums where people under electronic supervision describe what it’s like to wear a GPS ankle monitor. The accounts were consistent — and troubling. “I can’t play basketball anymore. The thing shifts around and […]
