Home Confinement and Electronic Monitoring for DUI Offenders
Keeping drunk drivers off the road continues to be one of the nation's paramount safety concerns. About half of all traffic fatalities are alcohol related and the recidivism rate among convicted DUI offenders is high.

In Utah, state Representative Nora Stephens wants to use home confinement and electronic monitoring to restrain and punish convicted DUI offenders. She says the goals are to ease jail overcrowding, to allow offenders to continue to support their families, and to have the offenders pay the costs of renting the electronic monitoring bracelet. Representative Stephens may even try to include in her proposed legislation a clause that requires convicted DUI offenders to refrain from using alcohol.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration claims that only 3% of those serving their sentences at home are caught again violating DUI laws. "Caught" may be a key distinction in tabulating this statistic. Home confinement and electronic monitoring should allow the court to keep a tight set of reins on DUI offenders, however, many of them consider home confinement to be more punitive than even Intensive Probation Supervision, another of the popular intermediate sanctions.

In your mind, how punitive is home confinement? Electronic monitoring? Does being at home without a physical check being made by a probation officer create a temptation to violate probation that is too hard for most offenders to resist? Finally, is DUI a crime for which home confinement and electronic monitoring are properly suited? (Associated Press, Desert News-Utah News, September 8, 1998)