Electronic plan bears watching

School is back in session. Do you know where your child is?
In San Antonio, Texas, court authorities want to know where truant students are.
So they are launching a controversial test program in which students with a history of skipping school will be required to wear ankle bracelets.

“… [W]e can either educate or incarcerate,” said Linda Penn, a justice of the peace. Some students are at a critical age where they either absorb the benefits of school or are sidetracked into a life of crime, costing them and taxpayers sorrow, money or both. Ms. Penn and others want to block that sidetrack.
Global Positioning Satellite technology will let them know where the kids are at any time.
The aim is to find out where they are if they’re not in school — and, more important, keep them in school by providing a deterrent effect. If kids can’t get away with truancy, why try?

Because of the fact that the students already have entered the criminal justice system, electronic monitoring makes sense and has precedent.
But an obvious question comes to mind, one raised by civil libertarians. The ankle bracelets will let authorities track the students at any time of day. What’s to stop Big Brother government from looking over kids’ shoulders, say, when they’re on a date?
That troubles us as well.

But a proposed alternative, having students wear the bracelets only during school hours, poses problems of practicality. Someone has to be responsible for putting the bracelets on off — and that someone cannot be the student, who should not be given the electronic key.
Students, too, would have to be responsible enough to show up to have the bracelets activated — and if they’re planning to skip school, why would they do that?
Nor should authorities be asked to electronically turn the system on and off. That would not solve the philosophical problem. If authorities couldn’t be trusted not to “watch” kids when the system is running, they couldn’t be trusted to turn it off so they can’t “watch.”

What makes electronic monitoring palatable is the fact that the students who will be involved have already been placed in the justice system. They are among their area’s worst offenders; their history of truancy already has brought them into court.
Electronic monitoring is a now common protocol when authorities wish to keep track of someone on parole or probation, for instance.
The key, figuratively speaking, may lie in whether the students have been convicted or not of breaking the truancy law.

If they have, then electronic monitoring is just another form of punishment — and one that is far milder than incarceration in juvenile hall. Convicted felons, including juveniles, give up certain rights. Ankle bracelets do not seem to be an unfair or onerous burden. Giving up the right of privacy for the benefit of freedom — including the freedom to go to school — sounds like a great trade.

But if students have not yet been convicted, then forcing them to submit to ankle bracelets takes electronic monitoring far beyond its currently recognized use and far beyond the level of fairness a free society should demand.