The article highlights how our correctional system increasingly relies on sophisticated technologies, such as GPS, to manage non-incarcerated offenders, particularly sex offenders. This boom of "technocorrections" perhaps is a good thing: by making supervision efficient we can be more confident that our various government agencies are indeed keeping tabs of the offenders we're so concerned about.

Many civil libertarians are surely critical of these laws for their supposed overinclusiveness; as mentioned previously, there's good reasons to be skeptical of some of our sex offender policies. Yet there may be another reason why we should be wary: the numbers. As the St. Louis Post Dispatch states:

More than 600,000 registered sex offenders can be found in state and national databases, run both by government and private industry.

That's a lot of folks under the purview of our correctional agencies given the relatively short 13 year history of these laws.

Sex offender registries and the numerous community supervisory laws are beginning to look a lot like parole and probation. This comparison is rather intuitive and hardly illuminating and yet the underlying question begs: how satisfied are we with our current parole and probation system? For many "law and order" citizens, these areas of the penal system are an embarrassment at best and a farce at worst. They epitomize the bureaucratic system with its obsession of form over substance; or to put it differently, emphasis on check-box structure over prudent management of recidivists. Indeed, how many stories of parolees who repeatedly fail their conditions of parole only to re-offend do we need before we rethink our parole system?

Perhaps this strong sentiment is somewhat unfair towards the men and women who work in the corrections field. After all, they are given the nearly impossible task of maximizing the efficiency of our prison system by maintaining large numbers of offenders within the community which is surely cheaper than keeping those same folks in prison. What parole and probation have really become is less about rehabilitation and so much about mortgaging safety and deferring punishment to support the huge appetite of our ever-expanding criminal codes. It is hardly a secret that the legislative template for bad behavior during the past 30 years or so has been to outlaw it at an astonishing pace (see, e.g., William J. Stuntz, Criminal Law's Pathology, 101 Michigan Law Review 828 (2002) for one such discussion)).

Yet everything is purchased for a price. For our expanding criminal code, this often seems to be size in exchange for efficacy. The efficacy though efficiency that technocorrections promises is a dream yet unrealized in a correctional age attentive to form and lacking in substance as any cursory look at recidivism statistics clearly reveals, and this seems to include sex offenders. Perhaps the lesson we need to learn from those painful statistics suggests a refocus on substantive changes to our community reintegration model of criminal justice instead of the hope that technology will foster a better form of the current model of a wide but poorly mended net. The families of victims such as Megan Kanka deserve as much.