State legislators acknowledge that implanted GPS chips would aid the nearly three-week search, but worry about human rights. Geoff Redick reports.

With the manhunt for escaped prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat nearing three weeks, state officials are discussing ways to prevent such long and costly searches in the future.

A State Police update at noon Wednesday confirmed reports that DNA evidence had tied the inmates to a Franklin County hunting cabin, near the community of Owls Head. Troop B Commander Maj. Charles Guess said the evidence shows Matt and Sweat were at the cabin as recently as Saturday morning.

"We have every reason to believe that they were last seen where that cabin is," said Guess, while stressing that State Police have not recorded any confirmed sightings of the inmates. "We have virtually 100 percent assurance that they were in that area."

Meanwhile, as legislators in Albany talk about preventing future expensive manhunts, one solution keeps coming up: implanted microchips.

"If (microchips) were in place on escaped inmates, they would obviously be very easy to track," said Assemblyman John McDonald, D-Cohoes. "We had one of our dogs get away a couple of weeks ago. With the chip, within 10 or 15 minutes the dog was back home."

Chip implants for domesticed animals have been around close to 30 years, though the technology became mainstreamed over the last decade. The chips, sometimes as small as a grain of rice, are usually placed around the animals' neck area, and may include GPS tracking ability as well as scannable owner information. An animal with a microchip is akin to wearing a high-tech collar.

Observers have recommended for years that prison systems implant at least violent offenders with similar chips, to deter escape and expedite prisoner captures. The question of morality is ever-present in the debate.

"They are human beings, and we shouldn't be treating human beings like animals, regardless of the crime," McDonald said Wednesday. "I'm concerned that it run against human rights. It's an item that's worth discussion down the road."

Republican state Sen. Kathy Marchione of Halfmoon has long supported GPS tracking for inmates, and lent her tacit support to microchipping on Capital Tonight last week. Following a rebuttal from the New York Civil Rights Union, Marchione has slightly changed her opinion.

"We're spending upwards of a million dollars a day, tracking these (Richard Matt and David Sweat). We need to be able to do something," she said. "At this point, I think I'd prefer to look at an ankle bracelet or something outside the body, rather than a chip."

Neither legislator expects a microchipping bill to make the Senate or Assembly floor, at least not in the next several years.

State Police said Wednesday that their primary search area has been reduced to 75 square miles of Franklin and Clinton counties, in the immediate area of Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora. Search efforts were to continue in the town of Bellmont, and the town and village of Malone.