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A strict parole officer could plausibly sketch out a complete weekly routine for his parolee, with specific times when he would have to leave home and specific stations he would have to tag throughout the week. He might allow, or even require, the parolee to go to the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon, and go for a jog along an authorized route every morning. Roberts pulled up another Bing map for me, and set in motion a faster-than-real-time playback of one client's day. As his dot carefully skirted the exclusion zones around a school and a park, staying away from kids because of the absolute certainty that BI would report him if he did not, his life on the outside looked fully set out in advance, as if he moved not on his own feet but on rails laid by his parole officer. For BI clients, technology has made detection of any deviation a near certainty—and with detection a swift response, one that often leads straight back to the Big House.
Criminals typically differ from the broader population in a number of ways, including poor impulse control, addictive personality, and orientation toward short-term gratification rather than long-run consequences. More than a fifth of all incarcerated criminals are in for drug offenses, and a large portion of the others abuse legal and illegal substances. If one were to design a criminal-justice system from scratch with these characteristics in mind, it would be difficult to come up with something less effective than what we have today.
Take the world of supervised release, for example. With some exceptions (BI clients prominent among them), parolees and probationers know that if they violate the terms of their release, they are unlikely to be caught—and even less likely to be punished. So, impulsive as many of them are, they will transgress, perhaps modestly at first, but over time with growing recklessness, until many have resumed the criminal habits—drug use, theft, or worse—that got them arrested in the first place.
This prevailing condition is something Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles and a leading advocate of non-prison alternatives, calls "randomized severity": some transgressors will be punished for violations, sometimes quite harshly, but others will not be punished at all, whether because their delinquencies go undetected or because judges, police, and parole officers decline to pursue the severe penalties that could apply. In his 2009 book, When Brute Force Fails, Kleiman argues that such capricious enforcement undermines efforts to reduce crime, and moreover that tough penalties—such as the long sentences that have contributed to clogged prisons—don't do much to help, despite their high cost. The alternative, Kleiman suggests, is a paradigm called "swift and certain" justice, first proposed by Cesare Beccaria in the 18th century: immediate, automatic penalties—though not necessarily severe ones—doled out by credible, identifiable figures.