Monitored, Not Free: The Hidden Burdens of Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Maryland

Electronic monitoring — ankle bracelets, GPS tracking, curfew enforcement — is widely understood as an alternative to incarceration. The idea is that releasing someone on electronic supervision is more humane and more cost-effective than holding them in jail while they await trial.

A May 2025 report from the Abell Foundation and the Justice Policy Institute challenges that assumption — not by defending pretrial incarceration, but by examining what electronic monitoring actually does and doesn’t accomplish.

The report, “Justice by Geography: Improving Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Maryland,” arrives at a moment when Maryland’s pretrial supervision system is in transition. In February 2024, federal COVID-era appropriations that had funded the state’s electronic monitoring programs abruptly expired, affecting hundreds of people under supervision across all 24 jurisdictions — Baltimore City and Maryland’s 23 counties.

What the Research Found

The Justice Policy Institute, which conducted the research for the report, surveyed pretrial supervision leaders from all 24 Maryland jurisdictions and interviewed representatives from five licensed private electronic monitoring providers. It also analyzed eight years of aggregate pretrial EM supervision data.

The core finding is uncomfortable: “EM does not reliably reduce failure to appear or recidivism in pretrial populations.”

That finding runs counter to the assumptions of many judges and prosecutors. The report notes that stakeholders — including people under supervision, judges, and prosecutors — generally view electronic monitoring as a preferable alternative to jail. That preference is understandable: for most people, being monitored at home is better than being detained in a facility. But being preferable to jail does not mean electronic monitoring achieves its stated goals of ensuring court appearance and preventing new offenses. The evidence, the report concludes, does not support that claim.

The Burden That Gets Underestimated

What electronic monitoring does reliably do, the report argues, is impose significant burdens on the people wearing the devices.

Those burdens are concrete and daily: restricted movement, curfew requirements that conflict with work schedules and family obligations, device charging requirements, check-in protocols, and the constant awareness of being tracked. For people who are legally presumed innocent — pretrial monitoring applies before any conviction — these constraints represent a significant deprivation of liberty.

The financial burden matters too. While electronic monitoring is often funded publicly, some jurisdictions charge participants fees that can reach hundreds of dollars per month. For low-income defendants — who are dramatically overrepresented in the pretrial population — these fees can mean choosing between the monitoring fee and rent, food, or childcare.

“The burden it poses must be taken seriously,” the report concludes, arguing that the costs imposed on individuals should be weighed explicitly against any public safety benefits — benefits the research suggests are uncertain at best.

“Justice by Geography”

The report’s title points to a finding that is both simple and significant: outcomes in Maryland’s pretrial system vary substantially depending on where you live.

Whether a person in Maryland is monitored, detained, or released without supervision before trial depends less on their individual circumstances than on the practices of the jurisdiction where they are charged. Baltimore City handles pretrial supervision differently than Anne Arundel County or Baltimore County or Prince George’s County. Those differences are not always explained by differences in crime type or defendant risk — they often reflect differing resources, philosophies, and histories.

The result is a system where the zip code of your arrest shapes your pretrial experience as much as the facts of your case.

What the Report Recommends

The Abell Foundation and Justice Policy Institute call for reforms that would reduce the burden of electronic monitoring while strengthening pretrial services that are actually shown to work — specifically, court reminders, transportation assistance to hearings, and social service connections that address the underlying conditions that lead to missed court dates.

For Baltimore, where poverty and transportation barriers already make navigating the court system difficult, these recommendations are particularly relevant. The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance tracks indicators related to criminal justice involvement across the city’s neighborhoods — including pretrial detention rates that reflect the geographic inequalities the report documents.

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This article draws on “Justice by Geography: Improving Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Maryland,” published by the Abell Foundation and the Justice Policy Institute in May 2025 (abell.org).