House Arrest

About the Program

Category: Human Services (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

In December 2007, the Wilson County Sheriff’s Department notified Wilson County Child Support that they wanted to pilot the use of electronic monitoring devices. The sheriff wanted to target non-violent, non-custodial parents who are repeatedly detained for non-payment of child support. The County hoped that this would save money for housing and assist its efforts to collect child support for those most difficult cases. The costs of the program were absorbed by the sheriff’s department and, if proven successful, its principles would be utilized in some of the County’s criminal cases. The non-custodial parents that were placed on house arrest have a long and lengthy history with child support and the Wilson County Detention Center as repeat offenders. The average stay at the detention center for the non-custodial parents prior to the implementation of this program had been 120 days or more. The sheriff could immediately see savings for the detention center and child support was seeing payments on cases that had never or seldom received payments.