Doing time at home

Where only first names appear, names have been changed to protect the identities of the sources.

One day last February, Tony, a junior, skipped school and stumbled upon a dark blue Honda Civic in Wheaton. The car's unlocked doors beckoned to him, inviting him to come inside. As he approached the lonely vehicle he looked around to make sure no one was watching. Then, in what he refers to as a "spur-of-the-moment" decision, he jumped in, ripped open the console, hotwired the car and drove off to Wheaton Mall.

Six hours later, as he drove home in the stolen car, two police cars surprised him, boxing him in and forcing him to step out of the vehicle. The officers handcuffed Tony and took him to the Wheaton Police Station, where he underwent three hours of questioning before his parents could take him home. But those three hours of interrogation were not the only consequences of Tony's impromptu heist - four months later, a judge sentenced him to two months of house arrest.

House arrest is a common substitute for jail time among adolescents. According to Maryland's Coalition of Families for Children's Mental Health, approximately 51,450 youth arrests have been made thus far in 2006 in Maryland alone, and 23 percent of these adolescents were placed under informal supervision, or house arrest.

Though the long months of strict observation and heavy restrictions can be difficult, Blazers who have been under house arrest say the experience was positive and that the constant supervision was the force they needed to turn their lives around.

Locked down

Months before Tony faced a judge, his parents handed down a sentence of their own. After their son's arrest, they did not let him leave their home except to go to school, although they eventually eased their restrictions. After his hearing in July, Tony was assigned a probation officer and forced to wear an electronic sensor to monitor his every move.

Under house arrest, juveniles are confined to their homes and monitored using an electronic sensor hooked to their ankle. The sensor, linked to the home telephone line, sends a signal to a central computer at the closest juvenile justice center. If teens step out of their authorized radius, the signal is disrupted, and the probation officers are notified of the date and time of the violation.

At the start of his sentence, he was required to give his officer a schedule of his school hours and undergo weekly drug tests. Under these strict restraints, Tony says he stayed out of trouble.

Two summers ago, Ben, a senior, found himself in a similar situation after he was convicted of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. While Ben and his friends were trailing their would-be victim, an undercover police officer pulled them over and arrested each of them for "suspicious behavior," Ben says.

After being arrested, Ben was taken to the Montgomery County Detention Center, where he spent a full day in lockdown before his mother came to pick him up. The officers released him under the condition that he be placed under house arrest. For the next six weeks, Ben was strapped with an ankle monitor. He could only leave his home between noon and 9 p.m., and he had to be accompanied by his mother at all times. In addition to subjecting him to biweekly urinalysis, his parole officer contacted him daily to verify that he was adhering to his restrictions.

Though he was tempted to break the rules of house arrest, Ben never left home. "I never tried to go out," he says. "I knew I'd get locked up if I did."

Under the influence

Last January, Matt, a sophomore, was smoking marijuana outside the Four Corners shopping center with two friends when a police officer came up and, noticing a knife Matt had tried to conceal, arrested the teenagers. When he ran a background check on each of them, the officer found that Matt had ignored a court summons - earlier this year, he had been charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and arrested for breaking and entering houses in his neighborhood.

A month earlier, Matt and his friends skipped school to steal electronics from a neighbor's house, but the owner caught them in the act. Matt lied his way out of the situation, claiming that the owner's son had skipped school with the group of boys and let them in the house, but he was not yet out of trouble.

Later, when the neighbor realized that Matt had lied, she confronted him and filed a police report. A few days later, the police showed up at Matt's house with a search warrant and, after finding several stolen Play Stations and portable DVD players, read him his rights and arrested him. The officers drove him to the Silver Spring Police Station and questioned him about the crime. Matt claims he answered all the questions truthfully, but he says he was under the influence of both marijuana and alcohol at the time. After the interrogation, the officers took him home.

Matt did not have the same luck with the officer who caught him smoking in Four Corners in January. He was taken to the Alfred Noyes Children's Center, one of six detention centers in the area, to spend the night. The next day, the judge placed him under house arrest for the next seven months.

According to the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, house arrest is usually a punishment for felony offenders convicted of non-violent or property crime. House arrest was the clear choice in Matt's case, since his crimes were not severe enough to warrant placement in a juvenile detention center for an extended period of time.

With the electronic sensor buckled tightly around his ankle, Matt was not permitted to leave his house without his parents except to go to school, and he had to come home right after class ended. "I couldn't do anything that a regular teenager would be able to do," Matt says.

Even while Matt was in school, he was kept under close watch: His probation officer made daily phone calls to Blair and often visited the school to make sure that Matt had attended all of his classes.

Although Matt's house arrest ended this past July, he was still required to meet with his probation officer and take regular urine tests to verify that he wasn't taking any illegal substances. Within weeks, however, Matt relapsed into his old habits of drinking and drug-use. After he tested positive during one of the routine checks, his probation officer decided that Matt needed to be put back under house arrest.

In mid-August, Matt served another sentence that lasted until mid-October. While he admits that the punishment was severe, Matt believes the penalty was ultimately fair. "It's better to be out here doing something than being in jail doing nothing," he says.

While the term house arrest usually implies a legal sentence, many teens are placed under informal house arrest by their parents as a punishment. On Sept. 22, Carlos, a senior, was filming a clip of the movie "Jackass 2" on his cell phone when an usher caught him in the act. The police arrived, handcuffed him and escorted him to the police station. There, the officers took his mug shot and notified his parents.

Though he was only charged with a misdemeanor, Carlos remembers that his parents were "mad as hell." For two weeks, they only let him out of his house for school and work. His parents wouldn't let him contact his friends, and he remembers feeling suffocated by their restrictions. "If I'm not allowed to go out, I'm basically dead," he says.

A lesson learned

Looking back on their experiences, these students agree that house arrest improved their behavior and mentality. Given a second chance, Matt would not make the same decisions. "I regret basically everything: the robbing, the skipping, the drinking, the smoking," he says.

Like Matt, Ben says his run-in with the law has changed him for the better. "I regret hurting somebody, but I don't regret getting locked up," he says. "It changed how I was living."