Home Confinement (House Arrest)

Abstract

House arrest has yet to find its formal historian but from fragmented sources we know that it was used in the pre‐modern era, usually but not necessarily as a form of detention for more privileged critics of political or ecclesiastical authority. It acquired sinister, antidemocratic connotations as a penal intervention in the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, and is still used in China (sometimes with government closed‐circuit television cameras trained on the home), often but not always for more privileged dissidents with strident supporters in the West. With the exception of its occasional use as a wartime “emergency power”, pretrial detention at home (bail) has been its only legacy in Western democratic societies. Both this and home confinement as a judicial or executive punishment increased in penal status when electronic monitoring became available to enforce them.