Are You Still Able to Shower While Wearing an Ankle Monitor?

For reasons we needn’t go into, a friend of mine may be facing house arrest with an ankle monitor. Will he still be able to shower? Change socks? If he forgets to plug in the charger overnight, will he go to jail? I’d ask him, but it might be a sore subject. —Innocent Bystander

I’ve never had any direct experience with such devices, Bystander (I know, right? I’m as surprised as anyone), but they’re widely touted as a cheaper and less restrictive alternative to conventional incarceration. Sure, much of that touting is being done by the burgeoning private electronic-monitoring industry, but if you can’t trust the prison-industrial complex, who can you trust?

I don’t doubt that most people, including your friend, would choose a year of house arrest over a year in the big house. Are ankle monitors really keeping folks out of prison, though? Or merely further burdening low-level offenders who in simpler times might have drawn ordinary probation? According to the Vera Institute, electronic monitoring grew nearly tenfold from 2005 to 2022, while conventional incarceration fell modestly, by 16%. In other words, who knows? This shit is complicated.

But you want the nitty-gritty details: Will the cops be able to hear your friend masturbating? Probably not—there are ankle monitors that allow two-way audio communication, but luckily for your friend these have poor water resistance and usually lose out to simpler units that have no problem going through baths, showers or the occasional car wash. Meanwhile, the monitor installers are supposedly skilled enough to do so in a way that makes socks easy to change, while still keeping the strap too tight to slip off. (Though in 2011 a U.K. con briefly beat the system when techs failed to notice they’d affixed a monitor to the subject’s prosthetic leg.)

Finally, if your friend forgets to charge his monitor, will he go to jail? Maybe! I assumed they’d have some high-tech battery that stays charged for months at a time, but apparently ankle monitors do have to be plugged in, and participants are sternly admonished not to let them go dark. As someone who routinely wakes up to a dead iPhone, the thought of being jailed for forgetting to plug something in is quite scary. Then again, many ankle monitors also enforce abstinence from alcohol, which I daresay would reduce this risk considerably. But at what price?

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.