New report highlights the "promise of targeted home confinement with electronic monitoring"

The Niskanen Center today released this short new report, title "Safer, Smarter, and Cheaper: The promise of targeted home confinement with electronic monitoring," authored by Greg Newburn, Richard Hahn and Matthew Bulger.  Here is its summary:

Under the CARES Act, signed into law in March 2020, Congress temporarily expanded the authority of the federal Bureau of Prisons to place prisoners in home confinement.  As of May 27, 2023, BOP had placed 13,204 individuals into home confinement under that authority.  As of May 1, just 22 of those people had been returned to prison for committing a new crime.

Congress should pass legislation to establish a program modeled after CARES Act home confinement.  This legislation should make home confinement a default sentence for offenders who meet certain criteria and provide sentence enhancements for crimes committed while on home confinement.  Additionally, Congress should empower BOP to modify supervision and behavioral expectations; adopt swift and certain sanctions for non-criminal rule violations; test different eligibility criteria; and incorporate graduated reintegration to ease the transition from supervision to freedom.

Research evidence from both the U.S. and abroad suggests home confinement is an effective and appropriate alternative to imprisonment for lower-risk offenders.  A modified home confinement program would lead to substantial savings that could be reinvested in police to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate dangerous criminals who would otherwise remain free, and help BOP better manage the population of prisoners housed in federal facilities.

Some prior recent related posts:

• Senator Booker releases policy brief highlighting CARES Act home confinement program 
• Another encouraging report on those released under federal CARES Act
• Celebrating "real" recidivism is essentially nil, and even technical violations stunningly low, for CARES home confinement cohort
• More notable details on the remarkable success of those released from federal prison under CARES Act  
• Spotlighting again the decarceral success of the CARES Act 
• With pandemic legally winding down, should Congress build in CARES Act success to greatly expand BOP home confinement authority?