You may remember this little dumbell-looking Recon Scout drone we saw last year, when it had just been implemented in the military. If you'll recall, the robot selflessly allows itself to be thrown into wild and unpredictable situations deemed "too risky" for people, then transmits grainy video back to an Operator Control Unit. Well, it turns out that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was interested in this rugged bastion of self-sacrifice, too. They can apparently envision all kinds of nightmare scenarios where prisoners have weapons and no human wants any part of it -- which is why they've agreed to a rental contract where they get ten devices and developer ReconRobotics gets feedback from the Department in exchange. Seriously though, aren't there any jubilant tasks we could set this guy to? He's getting to be such a killjoy.

We haven't yet heard of any problems with the RFID tags increasingly being used to monitor inmates in prisons, but it looks like the electronic tags used to keep watch on early release offenders are decidedly less reliable, at least according to a recent investigation into the matter in Scotland. As The Scotsman reports, out of a total of 987 tagging orders issued, there were 285 incidents where the tags failed, with dead batteries the biggest culprit. That rather obvious problem accounted for 185 of the cases, with damage to the unit by the offender, problems with the black box in the offender's home, and a weak signal rounding out the technical difficulties. That, as you might have guessed, has lead some to question the Scottish government's practice of relying on electronic tags to monitor early release offenders, but the government seems to be sticking to its guns, with a spokesman saying that "a breach does not necessarily equate to reoffending," although, as the Scotsman reports, it did recently scrap a plan to tag suspects who were allowed out on bail.

[Photo courtesy of The Daily Mail]

The Dutch Ministry of Justice recently announced that special knee locks to prevent prisoner escapes could be tested later this year if parliament gives its approval. In the Netherlands, a "furlough" system is used to gradually reintroduce prisoners that have committed serious offenses back to society: instead of letting prisoners out when their term ends, they are accompanied by a guard to visit relatives, and gradually given more freedom until it is deemed that they are ready for unsupervised parole. Unfortunately, there have been several cases where prisoners on leave committed serious offenses like rape and murder by slipping away from their guards. The purpose of this test is to see whether a knee locking system -- which prevents a prisoner from moving if they move a certain distance away from their guard -- can prevent these kind of unfortunate cases. As draconian as this system may sound, it's probably the most humane of all the solutions that were looked at: prisoners could potentially have had to wear gadgets that gave them electric shocks or injected drugs to prevent them from escaping. The best part about this whole case is what justice ministry spokesman Wim van der Weegen compared the system to: illegally parked cars. Probably not the best analogy he could have used -- badly parked car = potentially inconvenient. Escaped prisoner = potentially capable of murder -- but we'll give Wim the benefit of the doubt this time, and mark it up as lost in translation.

[Thanks, Joel]