Compare and contrast house arrest, electronic monitoring, and GPS monitoring in terms of their structure and effectiveness.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

House arrest requires convicted offenders to spend extended periods of time in their own home as an alternative to an incarceration sentence. They might be sentenced to spend evenings at home and are allowed to go to work or might be subject to 24-hour confinement. Some house arrest programs are administrated by probation departments and others are judicial sentences. No definitive data indicate that house arrest is an effective crime deterrent, although house arrest does reduce costs and overcrowding in the correctional system. Electronic monitoring (EM) devices help probation officers to manage offender obedience to home-confinement orders. These devices have the benefit of being relatively low cost and high security while helping prisoners avoid the pain of imprisonment. Looking at house arrest, the use of EM can significantly reduce the likelihood of technical violations, reoffending, and absconding. There is also strong empirical evidence EM is an effective correctional strategy to divert offenders from prison. Some studies, however, found little evidence that EM can reduce recidivism. Global positioning system (GPS) monitoring enables authorities to monitor the geographic locale and conditions of release of an offender. A new form of GPS monitoring, called GeoShadow, is attempting to identify patterns that will help probation officers to better assess an offender's location in the community, identify patterns that lead to problem behavior, and improve corrections-based GPS monitoring systems. In this way, EM and GPS are similar in that they monitor offenders remotely although the way location and information are transmitted are different.