Safer, Smarter, and Cheaper: The Promise of Targeted Home Confinement with Electronic Monitoring

Implement and evaluate swift and certain sanctions for non-criminal rule violations.
Only around 3 percent of people on home confinement under the CARES Act home confinement were returned to secure custody for a violation of home confinement rules. Nevertheless, it makes sense to try to improve compliance, and to ensure that non-criminal rules violations can be punished without revoking home confinement status altogether. To that end, BOP should adopt an accountability model to allow for swift and certain sanctions for violations, perhaps by partnering with local law enforcement for more efficient administration. Two such models, HOPE probation and 24/7 Sobriety, have shown strong results at managing offender behavior by coupling clear rules with immediate and reliable sanctions.