Updated

Thousands of California parolees, many of them sex offenders, are removing court-ordered GPS monitors, often with little risk of serving time because state prisons are too full to hold them.

The Los Angeles Times reports more than 3,400 arrest warrants for convicts who tampered with tracking devices have been issued since October 2011. That's when the state began referring parole violators to county jails instead of returning them to its overflowing prisons.

The newspaper says nearly all of the warrants were for sex offenders, who are the vast majority of parolees with GPS monitors, and many were for repeat violations.

Californians voted in 2006 to require that high-risk sex offenders be tracked for life with the monitors, which are attached to rubber ankle straps embedded with fiber-optic cable.