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U.S.|Amid Calls to Reform Bail, Judges in St. Louis Embrace Ankle Monitors
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/st-louis-ankle-monitors.html
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Proponents say the devices have helped address inequities in the criminal justice system. But many defendants have experienced unintended consequences.
April 10, 2025Updated 5:35 a.m. ET
In the heat of an argument last spring, Khyla Mason raised a handgun into the air on a neighbor’s porch. She was acting in self-defense, she said, and never fired, but the confrontation was captured on video, and some children were nearby. Ms. Mason wound up in a St. Louis jail charged with unlawful use of a weapon.
Just a few years ago, someone facing the same charge in St. Louis was likely to pay a small bond and resume life as usual until trial, local attorneys said. But Ms. Mason, who was then 21, was released from jail with a box the size of a deck of cards strapped to her right ankle. It tracked her every move.
For weeks, the device alerted officials each time she missed her court-imposed curfew or left her house without approval. Sometimes, she was buying food or diapers for her 2-year-old son, or taking him to the hospital, she said. After more than two dozen violations, she was sent back to jail.
She remained there for a month.
More and more defendants across the country are being placed on electronic monitors, part of an ambitious effort to prevent overcrowding in the nation’s jails and keep people from being imprisoned while awaiting trial for minor offenses.
Like courts in Baltimore, Dallas and Los Angeles, the St. Louis city circuit court is among those that have embraced electronic monitoring as a powerful reform of the cash bail system. The number of new monitors activated here more than doubled from the first half of 2021 to the first half of 2024, when it surpassed 550, a New York Times analysis found.
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