Ankle monitors answer one question. The phone the person already carries answers the questions a supervision program is actually asking, at a cost the participant can afford: nothing.
Ankle monitors have been the default technology for location-based supervision for decades. They work, for the one thing they do. They tell you where a device is. What they do not do is remind someone of a court date, let them message their officer, tell the officer whether the person checked in, or write the visit note. And they cost about $300 a month, a figure agencies and judges have given us independently, usually charged to the person wearing it.
A judge decides someone can go home. Then the person sits in jail anyway because the only supervision option is a monitor they cannot pay for. In one large Missouri county, corrections staff review about 20 cases a week with the judge and the prosecutor's office, and at least half go on RePath instead of jail, most of them people who could not afford a monitor. Pretrial jail days in the county fell by more than 60% in the first year.
A rural Missouri pretrial administrator described the small-county version: "We do not have giant budgets for a bunch of ankle monitors like the big counties do." Her circuit built its whole pretrial program around RePath and took a 55-bed jail from 64 people to 33.
A rural Ohio chief probation officer put it in dollars. Every lost ankle monitor cost his county about $2,500 that never came back through court costs. In the life of the program, they have lost one rental phone. One Indiana county reports its supervision technology spend fell from about $100,000 a year to about $15,000 after moving to RePath.
A youth in Texas was on an ankle monitor and RePath at the same time. The monitor reported a violation. RePath showed where he actually was, and the judge compared the two in open court: the county was paying $300 a month for the monitor, and the phone was working better. That department now puts RePath on everyone, bracelet or not.
The first objection is always the same: they will leave the phone at home. Officers who run these programs answer it from experience. A Kansas recovery court officer: "We have just been so shocked at how many people will still do things they are not supposed to do and keep their phone on them, which means we see it via RePath." A youth who turned his location off was found through the location data of the youth he was with. Two officers checked the map over lunch, saw two participants going store to store, and found them at a liquor store they were not supposed to be in.
A Missouri treatment court director keeps participants on the phone instead of a bracelet because some of them would be fired for showing up to work wearing one, and some wear tall work boots it will not fit under. Employment is a phase requirement in most treatment courts. Hardware would have cost someone the job the court told them to keep.
For the small number of cases where a court has ordered a worn, tamper-evident device, that is the tool. Agencies that run both put RePath on everyone and reserve the hardware for the few. What they stop doing is putting a $300-a-month device on someone who would otherwise have sat in jail.
The full side-by-side is on RePath vs ankle monitors.
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