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Going down a rabbit hole. In the weeds. Up the proverbial creek.

I am pretty sure that all those sayings were created in an attempt to describe the joys of working with data. Certainly, they apply to a recent story I did on the extent of electronic monitoring of criminal offenders in Hawaii.

The starting point was a recent study by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice on the expansion of electronic monitoring technology nationwide.

Think GPS ankle monitors, voice verification and increasingly smartphone apps.

The findings? Between 2005 and 2021 the number of people in the country on . We’re talking big numbers.

The researchers estimate that between 2021 and 2022 there were 500,000 people in the criminal justice and civil immigration systems on some form of electronic monitoring in the United States.

It’s hard to tell where Hawaii sits in that picture because of the limited information available.

While the Vera Institute paper is the most comprehensive national overview of electronic monitoring since 2015, the numbers in the study cut off at 2021, and there isn’t a breakdown by state.

So I reached out to the , Jess Zhang and Jacob Kang-Brown, who shared the data they had received from the Hawaii State Judiciary back in 2021 for their research.

But, it turns out there’s no central public data on electronic monitoring in Hawaii, so I would have to replicate their request if I wanted to get more updated numbers.

It took the best efforts of staff at the State Judiciary and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to pull those numbers — which to their credit they did during a busy time in the Legislature without requiring a public records request to do it.

The most recent numbers for Hawaii showed 69 individuals on some form of electronic monitoring in 2021. That jumped to 175 in 2022 and dropped to 85 in 2023.

Here's What We Don't Know

These raw numbers only highlight how much we don't know about electronic monitoring here.

We don't know, for example, how long people are kept on electronic monitoring in Hawaii. The departments who supplied the numbers couldn't tell me.

And, we don't know much about who is, or has been, under surveillance.

We also don't know anything about how effective the technology has been here from a public safety standpoint, or whether it has enabled people under supervision to be more integrated in their communities, which is the argument for using this form of digital surveillance.

We do know that Hawaii keeps individuals on probation longer than any other state, but is that reflected in the length of time people are on some form of post-release monitoring?

As an example of what better information might look like, consider the findings from a recent study by the UCLA Law School's Criminal Justice Program of where its use is expanding at a high rate.

The research there found that the average number of days people spent on electronic monitoring exceeded the average length of stay in jail.

It also found that judges were increasingly opting for electronic monitoring even though standard monitoring was already available, and that the rates of individuals successfully completing a pretrial EM program were low.

None of these findings are necessarily an argument against expanding electronic monitoring in Hawaii, but at the moment we can't compare them to the situation here because ... no public data.

So, if there is discussion about the potential expansion of electronic monitoring programs locally, as the director of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Tommy Johnson told me in an interview, then the quality of information about the programs needs to be addressed.

And it's not like there isn't any data. You can be sure that the private companies contracted to provide electronic monitoring are swimming in it. It's just that none of it ends up being available to the public.

Those for-profit corporations like BI Inc. and Attenti are amassing vast amounts of personal information during monitoring via GPS and smartphone apps, raising concerns about the additional data they can access and potentially use for other purposes.

The  "it’s often unclear what the restrictions are for access to that data, or what the regulations are for storage, use, information security, and retention."

Legislation can be part of the solution. The state of Illinois has across 70 counties, but it also became the first state to require data collection on its post-release digital surveillance programs and it has .

Leaving the data aside, public scrutiny of monitoring programs is also critical to ensure that there's transparency about the performance of these vendors.

For example, Sentinel Offender Services -- the company that has the current $85,340 electronic monitoring contract with Hawaii -- was a decade ago, after an audit showed it had failed to monitor some people on probation for periods of up to a month, and didn't report others who repeatedly violated their conditions.

Finally, there's a significant chunk of information about the use of electronic monitoring here in Hawaii that we'll likely never have a handle on, and that's because it's within the purview of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The use of electronic monitoring by ICE tripled between 2021 and 2022, boosted by the growth of smartphone apps like SmartLINK.

ICE does track the number of people on its , but Hawaii's numbers are bundled up with those in the San Francisco area and can't be separated out, its communications department said.