Gov. Wes Moore’s budget proposal includes $3.2 million to cover the cost of pretrial home detention for people who are charged with crimes but can’t afford to pay for private electronic monitoring — extending a pandemic-era program that abruptly ran out of money last year.

If it survives the bumpy budget process ahead, the funding will prevent poor people from having to shoulder the cost of private electronic monitoring services while they await trial on criminal charges. Home detention, supervised with GPS monitors, is one of the tools that judges use to keep tabs on defendants who are released pretrial rather than held in jail.

The cost of the monitoring — about $450 per month — was prohibitive for some people accused of crimes, who faced the possibility of jail if they could not pay for their own home detention. In 2021, lawmakers tapped $5 million from federal COVID relief to cover the cost of monitoring for indigent Marylanders.

The cash was supposed to last until the end of 2024, but Maryland’s judiciary informed lawmakers in February that the funding had been exhausted early after an unexpected influx of invoices from private home detention companies. Hundreds of people faced jail time as the money for their home monitoring dried up.

After a scramble and tough questions from legislators, the Maryland Judiciary agreed to use money from elsewhere in its budget to cover the program through June 2025.

Moore’s budget would, for the first time, set aside money directly from the state budget for the program. The $3.2 million is the full amount the state judiciary requested for the program. A spokesman for the governor called it an “important initiative.”

As of October, the most recent data available, there were 640 participants in the judiciary’s program, a spokesperson said in an email. Since it launched in 2022, the program has cost a total of $6.6 million, including the $5 million in COVID funding.

“Ensuring fairness in pre-trial detention decisions will lower costs by helping prevent overcrowding in Maryland’s prisons, and will provide more equity in pre-trial incarcerations, while maintaining public safety,” a Moore spokesperson said in an email.

People who have been charged with crimes are considered legally innocent until they are convicted, either via a plea or a verdict at trial. But court officials still have to decide whether to hold defendants in jail until trial or release them, often onto electronic monitoring so their movements can be supervised. These decisions are often based on the defendant’s charges, criminal history and community safety considerations.

Deputy Public Defender Keith Lotridge said in a statement that the state’s electronic monitoring program is important because short-term jail stays can be devastating for defendants, who can lose jobs, housing and family stability, and because the cost of pretrial incarceration places burdens on local jails.

“We are pleased that the governor recognizes the importance of ensuring that individuals are not incarcerated merely because they cannot afford to pay the costs of electronic monitoring,” Lotridge said.

Criminal justice reform advocates say the pretrial release system in Maryland is broken, even after a 2017 effort to reform cash bail. While the use of cash bail has fallen since the change, judges increasingly turned to holding defendants without bail or using electronic monitoring to supervise them, even in cases where reformers claim it is unnecessary and burdensome.

A 2019 study by the activist legal group BALT found that the majority of Baltimore defendants who were jailed pretrial were never convicted of a crime, either because their charges were dropped or they were acquitted. The money for pretrial electronic monitoring is not refunded if a defendant isn’t convicted.

Lotridge called for judges to use home detention less often in their pretrial decisions.

“Judges have increasingly relied upon electronic monitoring, and we hope that they will more consistently consider release without monitoring where it is not truly necessary,” he said.