The emergency provisions in the CARES Act gave the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) the ability to place mostly minimum security prisoners on home confinement if they had underlying health conditions. For many prisoners, it meant spending years on home confinement instead of a prison setting. For the BOP it provided a glimpse of how it could effectively monitor many inmates in a setting other than a prison. However, that program is set to end in mid-May 2023.
The results of CARES Act home confinement illustrate what a successful program it was for the BOP. While the BOP was slow to act in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it eventually moved nearly 15,000 inmates to home confinement under the CARES Act. This not only moved vulnerable inmates out of the communal settings of prison, it helped reduce the population of inmates in the prison to achieve some level of social distancing. Few of those inmates on CARES Act violated the terms which sent them back to prison and fewer still committed another crime. The criteria to be on home confinement went well beyond just medical conditions as most all were minimum security inmates whose risk of recidivism and violence was minimal.
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