[Pnews] Shackles Aren’t “Bracelets”: Why We Should Be Concerned About the Marketing of Punitive Technology

[Prisoner News]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/20625/shackles-arent-bracelets-why-we-should-be-concerned-about-the-marketing-of 



  Shackles Aren’t “Bracelets”: Why We Should Be Concerned About the
  Marketing of Punitive Technology

BY James Kilgore <http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/322601> - 
October 23, 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Electronic monitors are devices of unfreedom—not decoration.

Ultimately, the pathway to ending mass incarceration is not devising new 
punitive technologies nor re-packaging current measures by pretending 
they are jewelry.

Courts, parole officers and sheriffs do not issue ankle bracelets. J-Lo 
wears ankle bracelets. Women in Egypt have worn gold and silver ankle 
bracelets for centuries. These accessories have little in common with 
the black boxes the criminal legal system straps on ankles as 
punishment. The most benign word we can use for them is “monitors.” 
Spanish-speaking immigrants have another term: “grilletes,” or shackles. 
Whatever you call them, they are devices of unfreedom—not decoration.

Why does this matter? The terms we use shape our understanding of 
people, technology and policy. Neutral or positive terminology dilutes 
the reality of punishment and deprivation. Hence, we have “correctional 
facilities” and “secure housing units,” rather than “internment camps” 
and “torture chambers.”

With the move toward decarceration gaining steam in many jurisdictions, 
shackles are gaining credence as a technological quick-fix. Many people 
in prison or jail jump at the chance to get out, regardless of the 
conditions. But once they get that “band” on their ankles, their 
perspective often changes. Johnny Page told /In These Times/ he spent 23 
years and nine months in prison in Illinois, only to be put on a 
grillete for 90 days.

He summed <https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=VoXtZqkVfcY> up his 
experience, explaining that “you don’t have to fight for the telephone, 
you don’t have to fight for the shower, but you’re still in jail.” 
Richard Stapleton, who headed up electronic monitoring in the Michigan 
Department of Corrections, appears to agree. He told /In These 
Times/ that putting someone on parole with a monitor is just “another 
burdensome condition of extending their incarceration.”

The implications of grilletes go far beyond traditional incarceration. 
Increasingly, these devices have GPS capacity—giving them the ability to 
monitor a person’s every move in real time. But they can also be 
programmed to incorporate “exclusion zones,” places where a person 
cannot go without triggering an alarm or a re-arrest. Given that just 10 
years ago, a majority of the population was still using flip phones, it 
is difficult to imagine where the technological capacity of phones and 
GPS is headed. What will it mean to be tracked in 2027?

Several possible dystopian scenarios emerge. The simplest is that we 
move hundreds of thousands of people out of prisons and jails into their 
houses, which become their new cells. This form of urban renewal recasts 
inner-city spaces as prisons beyond the walls, with families and 
individuals footing the bills for home incarceration and “monitoring 
service.” I call this e-carceration: the next step in the privatization 
of punishment.

But monitors are also surveillance devices, gathering data on people’s 
movements and storing it in a cloud somewhere. Most jurisdictions have 
few, if any, rules about how this information is stored, who has access 
to it or how long it is kept. In many German electronic monitoring 
programs 
<https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/publications/cjm/article/data-protection-and-electronic-monitoring-germany>, 
authorities delete all such information after two months.

In contrast, state contracts with electronic monitoring providers in 
Michigan and Florida require contractors to retain data for at least 
seven years. Through my years of research into electronic monitoring 
contracts, I determined that while state or local authorities usually 
own electronic monitoring tracking data, private companies typically 
maintain the databases. This gives rise to concerns about where this 
data may end up and if it could potentially be monetized.

The dystopian nightmare doesn’t stop there. As surveillance devices, 
grillettes can also enforce racialized, class-based zoning. We already 
have troubling historical precedent for racialized zoning, even without 
this technological capacity. Apartheid South Africa had a policy called 
influx control. Black people were issued a “passbook” which was like a 
domestic passport. For a Black person to enter a city, or even a certain 
section of the city, they needed to have a permit stamped in their 
passbook. Police were posted around the cities tasked with South 
Africa’s version of “stop and frisk,” asking Black people for their 
passbook. If they didn’t have a permit to be where they were, they went 
to jail.

With GPS, the state no longer needs passbooks or cops on the corner. 
Most of us already carry our passbooks with us in our cellphones. So, 
apart from e-carceration, we could even envision a form of 
e-gentrification, using technological tracking to keep certain people 
out of the rarefied areas designated for privileged consumers. While 
such scenarios are speculative, the example of South Africa shows that 
they are not outside the realm of possibility. The point is that we 
don’t know where this technology is headed, and we can’t trust the 
companies and politicians who are determining its direction.

So what is to be done? Throwing away our cellphones is unlikely to be 
the answer. Scrapping the term “ankle bracelet” for “grillette” or 
“shackle” is a start but hardly enough.

First, we need to legally recognize that putting someone on a monitor 
with house arrest is a deprivation of liberty—a form of incarceration. 
Anyone on a monitor should be getting credit for time served, whether it 
is in pre-trial release or as part of a sentence (In most of the 
jurisdictions I have examined throughout my years of research, this is 
not the case). And they should not be paying fees for it.

Second, we need to seriously regulate access to tracking information so 
that it does not become a vehicle to facilitate further punishment or 
restriction of movement.

Third, we must rein in electronic monitoring as a business, to keep the 
net from widening. The major players in electronic monitoring are The 
GEO Group, a private-prison corporation, and Securus, a prison-phone 
profiteer. These companies doubtless have strategic visions of how to 
expand their share in the marketplace of technological punishment.

Ultimately, the pathway to ending mass incarceration is not devising new 
punitive technologies nor re-packaging current measures by pretending 
they are jewelry. The pathway lies in taking hundreds of thousands of 
people out of cages, stemming the admission of new bodies and 
re-directing resources to individuals who are released from prison to 
their communities. They need access to opportunities, not “bracelets.”


    James Kilgore

<http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/322601/>

James Kilgore is a writer, activist and educator based at the University 
of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). His most recent book is /Understanding 
Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of 
Our Time/(The New Press, 2015). He is also the author of three novels, 
all of which were drafted during his six-and-a-half years in state and 
federal prisons in California. Follow him on Twitter: @waazn1.//

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