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Alm's program certainly seems effective—much like BI's technological solution to a similar set of problems. But as I stood in the security line at the courthouse where HOPE probationers report to urinate each morning, I couldn't help but wonder how much the constant monitoring takes over their lives, and whether this carefully demarcated kind of freedom is more wearying than it appears. Some of the probationers had come in from an hour away to take their test, and they all had to monitor, on pain of incarceration, whether there was ever a whiff of spliff in the air at their friends' places.
Back on the mainland, I asked law-enforcement officers and BI personnel, who have installed hundreds of monitoring anklets, how their clients first reacted when they felt the cinch of the band around their ankle and knew that, from that moment, they would be under constant surveillance. In most cases, Jennifer White told me, "they are just relieved to be at home and with their families and working." Some were even grateful, because the device gave them an excuse to avoid criminal friends: after all, no one wants to commit a crime with an accomplice who's being monitored. But not all were so upbeat. Some cursed. Others wept.
If the future of prisons is to be turned inside out, with criminals in the wild and their guards in a suburban midwestern office, how will the experience of being a convict change? The psychology of incarceration is well known not only to researchers, but to readers of Dostoyevsky and viewers of Oz. But to have your every step monitored as you make your way through life, ostensibly free—well, that is, so to speak, a brave new world.