Electronically Monitored Home Confinement

Abstract

As a tactic of control and punishment, “house arrest’’ has been used for millennia to sequester individuals such as deposed leaders, government officials, and political dissidents in a residence. Since the late 1980s, various forms of house arrest—typically involving some kind of electronic monitoring (EM) and therefore broadly referred to as electronically monitored home confinement (EMHC)—have come to play a role in both the criminal and juvenile justice systems of the United States and in other countries. Unfortunately, the US Department of Justice does not collect data on the numbers of persons under EM. According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts, more than 125,000 people were supervised by electronic means, up from 53,000 in 2005. The survey also found that all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government use electronic devices to monitor people at various stages of the justice system including pretrial defendants, immigrants awaiting deportation hearings, and convicted offenders. EMHC is considered an intermediate sanction that permits an individual to live at home except when authorized to attend school, treatment programs, and go to work, or meet with program officials. Participants must agree to an extensive list of conditions of their participation and they are often required to pay for their EMHC (typically $10–15 a day). Violators are commonly jailed for non-compliance. A variety of monitoring systems are used, the original and most common being some form of a continuous radio frequency (RF) signal between a receiver-dialer that is attached to a telephone line in the home and a transmitter that is worn by the offender on the ankle or wrist. With these “tagging” systems, individuals cannot stray further than 150 feet or so from the monitoring box without triggering a violation. More sophisticated designs are based on the Global Positioning System (GPS) that can track the whereabouts of individuals at all times, even if they have absconded from the home. Other systems have added biometric measurements such as transdermal alcohol testing to the anklet to determine a person’s blood alcohol content. Yet another version dispenses with the anklet monitor and a digital device is installed in the home and random phone calls from the program’s computer system must be answered by the offender when they are required to be in the home. To verify compliance, the system uses voice and facial recognition capabilities and collects a breath sample to test for alcohol.