One might think that anybody that is currently incarcerated, or are subject to being sentenced to incarceration, would, hands down, always take the option of home confinement, if so offered. The thing is, that how inmates or potential inmates, think about that type of choice, is going to often be a fundamentally different thought process than all those that have never been incarcerated or have been themselves never been intimately involved within the incarceration field. That is to say, a significant portion of people so incarcerated, are the type of people that have led troubled lives, and so their mindset is basically going to be a whole lot different than all those that have never experienced such, or been subject to such.
As much as anybody, prefers not to be locked up, it has to be said that for some people, in those types of penal situations, there becomes for them a certain routine and therefore a known knowledge of what that incarceration so consists of – and of which, some of those people thus find that overall the structure of that incarceration is going to represent something that they are basically content with and therefore they are then somewhat adverse to being placed into a new situation in which the rules are possibly more restrictive, harder to understand, and subject to arbitrariness by those that are the operators of that home confinement. Further complicating the matter is the fact that home confinement, often comes with the person so confined, having to pay some portion of their income or else are subject to paying a straight fee for that confinement. In other words, there is typically some monetary cost so being placed upon the shoulders of the person so being confined, which that person may or may not consider to be intolerable or overly burdensome.
So too, making the comparison of home confinement to incarceration can be even more difficult to determine as to which is best, because the fact is that in some situations, home confinement is longer in the amount of days, than what that inmate would serve if they just remained incarcerated. In other words, for some people, the simple formula of less days in jail, as compared to more days under home confinement, is something that has be seriously considered, amongst everything else.
The fact that so many inmates are subject to all sorts of rules, regulations, and restrictions, most definitely has its place and purpose – but what seems wholly unfair is that some of the cost of that incarceration or of that home confinement is being placed upon those that have little or nothing of material wealth to begin with, along with the salient fact that whatever wages that they will end up earning, is probably going to be rather paltry. This would seem to suggest that when it comes to incarceration as well as to home confinement, that those that are at the mercy of their governmental justice system, don’t often find mercy. Perhaps that is the way that it should or must be, but it certainly seems as if that justice system leans heavily upon those that are its most vulnerable, as if a boot upon a citizen’s neck is justice, when it surely is not.