[Pnews] Electronic Monitoring Has Widened Its Net Amid COVID

[Prisoner News]

truthout.org 
<https://truthout.org/articles/electronic-monitoring-has-widened-its-net-amid-covid/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=42a332c7-544a-45eb-8380-b0da4181427e> 



  Electronic Monitoring Has Widened Its Net Amid COVID

ByJames Kilgore <https://truthout.org/authors/james-kilgore/> & Emmett 
Sanders <https://truthout.org/authors/emmett-sanders/>, October 4, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------

For Mohawk Johnson, the next call from the Cook County Sheriff’s 
department may come at any time. It could be at 4 a.m. or smack in the 
middle of dinner. Over the course of a year on house arrest on a GPS 
monitor, Johnson estimates the sheriff’s department has called more than 
60 times accusing him of being AWOL when he is asleep in his bed, 
watching television or taking a shower. As a self-defense mechanism, 
Johnson has posted videos of many of these calls to his

Twitter account showing 
<https://twitter.com/i/status/1438702826344128513> himself crawling out 
from under the blankets to answer the phone or trying to relax in front 
of /Captain America/ on the TV screen as the call arrives. Johnson’s 
tweets, along with high-profile cases like those of activist lawyer 
Steven Donziger 
<https://nacla.org/news/2021/08/25/ecuador-chevron-donziger> and 
Baltimore grandmother Gwen Levi 
<https://truthout.org/articles/biden-upholds-last-minute-trump-memo-that-would-send-4000-people-back-to-prison/>_,_ 
have given the punitive vagaries of electronic monitoring (EM) a touch 
of media play.

But until recently, researchers have not stepped forward to provide data 
to substantiate stories like Johnson’s and provide fuel for activist 
campaigns against EM. The lack of data about electronic monitoring is 
shocking. To begin with, no national census of monitors exists. While 
prisons and jails produce population counts regularly, the last attempt 
at a national tally of electronic monitors was a 2016 census 
<https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2016/09/use-of-electronic-offender-tracking-devices-expands-sharply> 
by Pew Charitable Trusts which concluded that 131,000 devices were in 
use, excluding those used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 
Yet Pew’s total seems questionable, since a 2009 report 
<https://www.appa-net.org/eweb/docs/appa/pubs/OSET_2.pdf> by the late EM 
expert Peggy Conway placed the total number of monitors at nearly 
200,000. State and local authorities shed little additional light. Most 
keep no serious records of who is on the monitor, how often people are 
returned to custody due to violating the frequently irrational rules of 
EM or how many false alarms trigger undue arrests or harassment. Even 
basic annual reports or assessments are rare. The major companies that 
provide the devices and often run the programs — BI, Satellite Tracking 
of People (STOP), Sentinel, Attenti and SuperCom — are also notoriously 
secretive about their data. While knowledge of the harms done by these 
technologies to individuals like Johnson and Donziger has become well 
known, the normalization of GPS trackers in smartphones, fitness devices 
that record biometrics and the addition of Amazon Ring 
<https://mediajustice.org/news/amazon-doesnt-deserve-you/> to millions 
of front doors have softened popular concerns about the impact of 
carceral technologies like GPS ankle monitors.


    *New Research*

However, in the past three years, activist-researchers have begun to 
apply a critical lens to electronic monitoring. Three factors have 
precipitated this shift. First, the rise of the movement to end cash 
bail often prompted authorities to release people on monitors. Impacted 
individuals and many activists quickly realized release did not always 
equate with freedom. Under EM, people often landed back in jail for 
violating some petty rule. Alternatively, regulations like those applied 
to Mohawk Johnson frequently subjected them to extreme regimes of 
confinement in their own homes. As Timothy Williams, who spent several 
months on a pretrial monitor in Chicago put 
<https://chicagobond.org/2019/12/02/no-more-shackles-arguing-against-pretrial-electronic-monitoring-video-release/>it, 
electronic monitoring is “hell … the same as jail. There’s no 
difference.” Second, ICE has steadily increased 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/12/immigrants-report-physical-emotional-harms-electronic-ankle-monitors> 
the use of GPS tracking and other surveillance devices on immigrants. 
Lastly, during the pandemic, popular pressure to release individuals 
from the pressure cookers of carceral spaces prompted a turn to releases 
on monitors. As David Gaspar, The Bail Project’s national director of 
operations noted to /Truthout/, “It has become ridiculous how quick they 
are to hand out what has become their go-to piece of jewelry.” Since 
March 2020, the Federal Bureau of Prisons alone has granted early 
release to 
<https://www.bop.gov/foia/docs/Home_Confinement_Milestone_8.23.21.pdf> 
over 30,000 people, thousands of whom landed on house arrest with an 
ankle monitor.

Researchers like Ruha Benjamin, author of the prize-winning /Race After 
Technology/ 
<https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Race+After+Technology:+Abolitionist+Tools+for+the+New+Jim+Code-p-9781509526437>, 
George Washington University law professor Kate Weisburd, Chaz Arnett, 
Ali Panjwani and Puck Lo, as well as organizations like Mijente, Just 
Futures Law, Shriver Center on Poverty Law, Chicago Appleseed Center for 
Fair Courts, and the Community Justice Exchange have led important 
efforts to unearth the details of electronic monitoring. All told, the 
results of this new wave of research are providing the kind of data 
needed to fuel campaigns to block expanded use of electronic monitoring 
and other punitive technologies, often referred to as “e-carceration 
<https://www.challengingecarceration.org/what-is-e-carceration/>.”

At least three studies are surfacing previously unknown details about 
both the policy and operations of electronic monitoring and the overall 
industry. “Electronic Prisons: The Operation of Ankle Monitoring in the 
Criminal Legal System 
<https://issuu.com/gwlawpubs/docs/electronic-prisons-report?fr=sOGI5NDcxODg3>,” 
released by George Washington University (GWU) Law School in late 
September, constitutes the most comprehensive examination yet of EM 
policies and laws. In this study, a team led by Kate Weisburd collected 
and analyzed 247 records from 101 agencies in 44 states and the District 
of Columbia. Their scope included pretrial and post-prison EM, as well 
as juvenile applications of monitors. Weisburd, who in her courtroom 
days defended dozens of youths placed on electronic monitors, told 
/Truthout/ she aims to add “to the efforts of community organizers and 
advocates who are pushing back against the expansion of e-carceration.” 
The GWU work depicts “how monitoring is used, including the terms and 
conditions that people on monitors must abide by.” Weisburd said their 
project documents “the restrictive nature of monitoring that, like 
prison, infringes, if not eliminates, fundamental rights and undermines 
privacy, financial security, autonomy and dignity.” Some of the 
restrictions the team unearthed were staggering. In Kanawha County, West 
Virginia, for example, authorities compel a person on EM to agree that: 
“I will not allow persons of disreputable character to visit my 
residence during the period of home confinement.” In Cuyahoga County, 
Ohio, those on monitors are compelled to conduct themselves in “an 
orderly manner at all times.” No definition of “disreputable” or 
“orderly manner” are offered.

The Louisville Metro court specifies that a person under “home 
incarceration” must remain inside the house proper. For those 
authorities, “inside means no decks, patios, porches, taking out the 
trash, etc.” In Milwaukee, individuals are only allowed to go to the 
grocery store for one hour per week.

The language of the rules is often as punitive as their content. The 
Florida Department of Corrections informs people under their program: 
“You will charge the tracking device for a minimum of four (4) hours a 
day and at all times while at home unless otherwise directed.” In 
Kansas, a person is banned from sleeping while charging their device.

Privacy is another key issue. In San Francisco, people on monitors must 
“acknowledge that my EM data may be shared with other criminal justice 
partners.” No specific partners are mentioned. Six agencies actually 
require people on EM to submit to warrantless searches of their 
cellphones and other devices. The report also notes how devices are 
increasingly adding on features like two-way audio, meaning that the 
person’s ankle can operate like a speaker phone, “talking” loudly to the 
person on the device at any moment chosen by law enforcement. This 
creates a fear on the part of the user that the device may start 
“talking” while a person is at work or in other places where such an 
interruption would be problematic.

Weisburd’s team also compiled a detailed list of the daily user fees for 
many of the jurisdictions. These charges, simply for being on the 
monitor, range from $1.50 per day in Lancaster County, Nebraska, to $47 
per day for a self-employed person in Sacramento County, California. The 
charges in Sacramento would add up to over $17,000 per year, more than 
half the earnings of a person on minimum wage.

While the GWU study provided a broad overview, the Chicago Appleseed 
Center for Fair Courts produced the most detailed case study of an EM 
program to date: 10 Facts About Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Cook 
County 
<https://www.chicagoappleseed.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/202109_10-Facts-EM-Cook-County-FINAL.pdf>. 
Focusing on what is the largest and likely the most punitive pretrial 
electronic monitoring program in the country, this research aimed to 
refute arguments 
<https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/electronic-monitoring-what-it-is-and-what-it-isnt/2570027/> 
advanced by Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart that people on pretrial release 
on electronic monitors were contributing to heightened violence in 
Chicago. Appleseed Senior Policy Analyst Sarah Staudt, who led this 
research project, systematically refuted Dart’s allegations. In the kind 
of deep-dive research previously unseen in the world of electronic 
monitoring, Staudt exposed how the Cook County EM program has been 
dramatically expanding since the pandemic, that people are being kept on 
house arrest for longer periods than ever, and like every aspect of the 
criminal legal system, EM disproportionately impacts Black people. While 
Black people only comprise 23 percent of the county’s population, they 
constitute 74 percent of those on electronic monitoring.

The Appleseed document totally undermines Dart’s contentions that EM and 
pretrial justice reform are linked to violence. Contrary to Dart’s 
allegations, which are not supported by data, Staudt’s calculations show 
only 1 person in 12 on electronic monitoring is arrested on new charges. 
While the number of charges for acts of violence committed by people on 
a monitor has not grown, the figures for people sent back to jail for 
minor violations of monitoring rules has. Reincarceration for acts like 
failing to charge a battery, returning home late from work or not having 
a place to live more than quadrupled from 2019 to 2021. Moreover, people 
are spending longer periods on pretrial monitoring. At the time of the 
Appleseed research, over 1,000 people had been on EM for over a year, 
proving that Mohawk Johnson is not an exception. Lastly, the report 
debunked one of the major motivations for pretrial EM, ensuring 
attendance at court appearances. A survey of Cook County EM from 
2016-2018 showed virtually equal rates of appearance for all court 
appointments, for those on a monitor (83.52 percent) and those not on a 
monitor (82.75 percent). The study concluded that EM has “no clear 
benefit to the public” and at an annual cost of over $30 million, 
represents a drain from funding streams that could “prioritize 
investments in grassroots, non-court-related services to support people 
involved in the criminal legal system.”

While research in the criminal legal system has opened up lots of new 
territory, equally important advances 
<https://www.nationalimmigrationproject.org/PDFs/community/2018_23Oct_whos-behind-ice.pdf> 
in unearthing the complexities of electronic monitoring have come from 
immigrant rights activists. A collaboration among Freedom for 
Immigrants, Immigrant Defense Project and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School 
of Law surveyed the harms of EM for people under the authority of ICE. 
In perhaps the first serious look at the health implications of being on 
EM, their report found that more than 70 percent of the 147 respondents 
reported “aches, pains and cramps,” 55 percent reported numbness and 
roughly 1 in 5 said they had received electric shocks from the device. 
These findings raised possibilities for further study and even 
litigation concerning the health effects of ankle shackles, an aspect of 
EM that has been ignored by authorities and providers for decades. This 
work has melded with studies of the role of Big Tech in immigration 
carried out by a collaboration involving Mijente 
<https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/WHO%E2%80%99S-BEHIND-ICE_-The-Tech-and-Data-Companies-Fueling-Deportations-_v1.pdf>, 
Just Futures Law <https://justfutureslaw.org/resources/>, Immigrant 
Defense Project and the National Immigration Project.


    *EM and State Struggles*

The expansion of EM research coincides with intense struggles in state 
legislatures over pretrial reform where electronic monitoring has become 
an important contestation point. These fights demonstrate a growing 
understanding that electronic monitoring, like cash bail, cannot be 
attacked with a single-issue focus. Pilar Weiss, the director of the 
Community Justice Exchange, a network that organizes over 100 community 
bail funds, argues that framing is critical. She stresses that letting 
people out of jail without payment of bail opened the door to a range of 
post-detention conditions of which EM was one of the most common and 
likely the most restrictive. She reminded /Truthout/ that “the problem 
is not with the person but with the system.”

In at least three states, activists made serious interventions to block 
the use of electronic monitoring as part of legislative reform. In New 
York, blockage of EM came via banning the introduction of private 
companies or fees in monitoring programs. This forced jurisdictions to 
assume operational and financial responsibility for EM, a burden most 
authorities weren’t willing to cover. In the words of Katie Schaffer, 
who was active in the legislative campaign as director of advocacy and 
organizing for the Center for Community Alternatives, the bill made EM 
“functionally not an option.”

In Illinois, sparked by the work of the statewide Coalition to End Money 
Bond <https://endmoneybond.org/>, the legislature took a different path, 
passing the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), the first legislation 
in the country to ban cash bail. While the activist critique of EM was 
not enough to convince the legislature to totally ban electronic 
monitoring, the PFA ultimately called for mandatory court hearings to 
place a person on EM, coupled with a compulsory review of the electronic 
monitor’s continued use after 60 days. As Sharlyn Grace, a past leader 
of the Coalition recently wrote 
<https://inquest.org/organizers-change-whats-possible/>, the reforms 
“take away some power and prevent harmful practices from continuing 
unchecked.”

The California process was more complicated and remains unresolved. 
After many years of battling over pretrial reform, authorities advanced 
Proposition 25 
<https://www.ppic.org/publication/reforming-pretrial-justice-in-california/> 
to the November 2020 ballot. The proposition aimed to enact SB10, a bill 
which would have ended cash bail via intensive use of racially biased 
risk assessment tools and expansion of harsh conditions of release like 
EM. While mainstream Democrats and some progressives supported Prop 25, 
the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Californians United for a Responsible 
Budget, and a broad spectrum of abolitionists and radical reformers 
campaigned against Prop 25. Predictably, the bail bond industry also 
opposed the measure because it would have nullified most of their 
revenue stream. In the end, 55 percent of voters opposed the referendum 
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-11-03/2020-california-election-prop-25-results>. 
Activists hoped this would bring the use of risk assessment-based reform 
to a halt and provide space for community-driven initiatives based on 
participatory defense <https://www.participatorydefense.org/> and 
transformative justice. These approaches mobilize families and 
communities to contest individual cases as well as push to change the 
underlying structures that continue to propel Black, Latinx, Indigenous, 
and other marginalized folks into the system. But in the spring of this 
year, Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped in and allocated $140 million 
<https://www.davisvanguard.org/2021/05/ca-governors-revised-may-budget-includes-140-million-investment-in-flawed-pretrial-pilot-programs/> 
to place pretrial services statewide under the authority of the 
Department of Probation, effectively sidelining community-led efforts. 
This move will doubtless lead to the expansion of electronic monitoring. 
As campaigner Ivette Ale told /Truthout,/ “Probation loves EM.” In their 
capacity as a leading member of the CARE First Coalition, which aims to 
derail 
<https://carefirstca.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Letter-Opposing-140M-Probation-Pretrial-Expansion-Senate.pdf> 
Newsom’s moves, Ale told /Truthout/ the organizing strategy is to build 
grassroots structures in each of the state’s 58 counties. “We only win 
by mobilizing more people than anybody,” Ale emphasized.

Grassroots efforts have scored many victories in the fight against mass 
incarceration’s numerous fronts. But perhaps pushing back against 
technology also requires some additional strategies. Puck Lo, research 
coordinator at Community Justice Exchange, contends, “We need to go 
someplace we haven’t been before and to do that we need to think 
differently.” In the realm of surveillance technology, Lo views the 
merging of location tracking and biometrics as creating more potential 
for the criminalization of individuals through the use of technology. 
She maintains this may direct us to needing to find ways to “erase 
databases rather than control them.” But whether the aim is controlling 
the technology or erasing it, the key rests with building popular 
support for measures to undermine the power of Big Tech, EM companies 
and elected officials like Newsom and Sheriff Tom Dart who provide 
finance and political cover for widening the net of e-carceration.
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