not an easy option
Note: this was originally posted at the old wordpress.com blog on 17/12/2025.
Home detention is not the soft, easy option many seem to assume.
To be clear, I am not a lawyer or a probation officer, but I have spent a few years working with people on home detention, or paroled with partial or full residential restrictions, and I’ve noticed a few things.
Remember the Covid lockdowns? Remember how you could easily go for walks, pop down to the local shops, just generally got on with life so long as you stayed local and maintained social distancing? Remember how people complained about the mental health impacts of lockdown?
Now, on home detention you are confined to quarters. You are on electronic monitoring. If you step outside your boundary without prior permission, an alarm will sound. Your probation officer will be alerted. You will have some tough questions to answer, and you may be breached, possibly with Probation asking a judge to cancel your home detention and give you some jail time instead.
Generally speaking you will need to get permission to go out a week in advance. You will need to have paperwork from Probation on your person when you go out just in case you are stopped. You need a good reason to go out.
The only reasons you can go out without prior permission are the emergency kinds – for example, if you have heart attack symptoms and the paramedics want to take you to hospital, or if your house is on fire.
And if your convictions include internet-based offending, there’s a good chance you will have conditions limiting your internet access. I have clients who are completely banned from the internet and not permitted to possess any internet-capable devices – this can include your probation officer having a look at your TV to make sure you can’t use that to get online, and it does make obtaining a cellphone very, very difficult.
Yes, home detention is less restrictive than prison, but at least in prison you have clear, physical boundaries setting out the limits of where you can go. On home detention the boundaries are little more than code in a computer system. You are sitting there knowing that physically you could walk out your gate and down the street, but you are being watched, and if you do that without prior permission, the consequences could be quite severe.
Did you struggle to cope with the covid lockdowns? Don’t do anything to get yourself sentenced to home detention.