Manitoba could nix ankle-bracelet program

The Manitoba government is hinting that it's rethinking the use of movement-monitoring ankle bracelets to crack down on teen car thieves in Winnipeg. 

After two years of using the GPS technology-equipped anklets, the province said statistics show that nearly 60 per cent of young offenders ordered to wear one simply took it off, forcing police to hunt them down and rearrest them.

"It obviously shows that something is not working," Justice Minister Andrew Swan said Thursday.

Manitoba Justice rented about 20 of the bracelets from Nova Scotia as part of a trial program that began in April 2008.

$800K over 3 years

Under the rules of the program, only the most chronic teen auto thieves are outfitted by court order with the anklets, which they wear for a maximum of three months while they serve sentences in the community.

The anklets send out a signal every three minutes that is tracked by satellite and relayed to a monitoring station in Georgia.

If the bracelet is tampered with or the offender leaves a specified zone of movement, officials and police are notified by phone.

By the end of this year, the Manitoba government will have spent $800,000 on the ankle-bracelet program.

Swan has enlisted researchers from the University of Manitoba to study whether taxpayers' money is being well spent.

"It's a relatively costly program and we want to find out if we're getting value for our money," U of M criminologist Rick Linden said.

Linden is also co-chair of Manitoba's Auto Theft Task Force, which was set up about a decade ago to develop strategies to crack down on vehicle thefts.

Not effective

The problem has been most pronounced in Winnipeg, where a subculture of teen car thieves steal cars, drive them dangerously and endanger the public.

Linden said he doubts the bracelets have had any impact on kids who routinely steal cars. Studies done on the effectiveness of anklets in other North America cities suggest they don't.

"There's no research that suggests it's highly effective with high-risk people," Linden said.

"Some of these kids were out stealing four or five cars a day … at best, it's one of the tools that we can use under selective circumstances to perhaps reduce the incidents of repeat offending with these kids," Linden said.

However, the Opposition's justice critic said the real problem is that offenders with the bracelets believe that there's no real punishment for removing or tampering with them.

"It's not the bracelets that aren't working, it's the fact that there's no consequences for taking them off," Kelvin Goertzen said.

Study results are expected sometime in June.