Electronic Monitoring

Simply put, electronic monitoring is a technological advance to a common form of social control that has existed for centuries—house arrest. People have been restricted to their places of residence (e.g., homes, military barracks) as a condition of pretrial release, as a form of punishment and control following criminal conviction, as a condition of release during probation or parole, and as a means to emphasize and ensure treatment, among other functions. Electronic monitoring extends the conditions of house arrest by electronically tethering an individual to a generally static location, such as a residence. Early electronic devices sent repeated signals, indicating that the individual was in his or her home or within a specified distance from where the signal was generated, usually a monitoring device attached ...