Understanding E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring, the Surveillance State, and the Future of Mass Incarceration

by James Kilgore

Overview

A riveting primer on the growing trend of surveillance, monitoring, and control that is extending our prison system beyond physical walls and into a dark future—by the prize-winning author of Understanding Mass Incarceration

“James Kilgore is one of my favorite commentators regarding the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the necessity of pursuing truly transformative change.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

In the last decade, as the critique of mass incarceration has grown more powerful, many reformers have embraced changes that release people from prisons and jails. As educator, author, and activist James Kilgore brilliantly shows, these rapidly spreading reforms largely fall under the heading of “e-carceration”—a range of punitive technological interventions, from ankle monitors to facial recognition apps, that deprive people of their liberty, all in the name of ending mass incarceration.

E-carceration can block people’s access to employment, housing, healthcare, and even the chance to spend time with loved ones. Many of these technologies gather data that lands in corporate and government databases and may lead to further punishment or the marketing of their data to Big Tech.

This riveting primer on the world of techno-punishment comes from the author of award–winning Understanding Mass Incarceration. Himself a survivor of prison and e-carceration, Kilgore captures the breadth and complexity of these technologies and offers inspiring ideas on how to resist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620976142
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,085,170
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

James Kilgore is an activist, researcher, and writer based in Urbana, Illinois, where he has lived since paroling from prison in 2009. He is the director of the Challenging E-Carceration project at MediaJustice and the co-director of FirstFollowers Reentry Program in Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of five books, including Understanding E-Carceration and the award-winning Understanding Mass Incarceration (both from The New Press).

Table of Contents

Part 1 Introducing E-Carceration

1 Introduction 3

2 What Is E-Carceration? 16

3 Monitoring: Born in the Punishment Paradigm 34

4 Building the Myth of Electronic Monitoring: Not a "Shred of Data" 49

5 The "Wayward Technology": Busting the Myth of Electronic Monitoring 72

Part 2 Connecting the Dots: From Ankle Shackle to Surveillance State

6 Immigration and Electronic Monitoring: SmartLINKs and Geo-Fences 95

7 The Pandemic and the Growth of E-Carceration 114

8 Camden, NJ, and the "Silicon Valley Way of Doing Policing" 127

9 E-Carceration, Settler Colonialism, and the Open-Air Prison 140

10 Data Profiteering from the Bodies of the Criminalized 153

Part 3 Abolition and E-Carceration

11 Abolition and Challenging E-Carceration 177

Notes 203

Index 231

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Understanding E-Carceration: 
“Kilgore presents a devastating critique of policy tools like electronic monitoring that masquerade as meaningful alternatives to incarceration but offer little hope for a more just and humane future. There is a more promising way forward and this necessary and insightful book helps us to see the path more clearly.”
—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

“Essential reading. A powerful precautionary tale about how big data and technology can undermine the kind of society we want to build.”
—Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and America on Fire

“Uncovers the truth behind the digital smokescreen, revealing how the intimate details of people’s lives are devoured, digested, and used to deepen social control in the name of public safety and prison reform.”
—Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies at Princeton University and founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab

“Kilgore warns us that the surveillance state is forever upgrading tech to expand its reach. He carefully explains the harms of carceral technology and invites us to work for an abolitionist future.”
—Naomi Murakawa, associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University

“An incisive, thoroughly researched, and utterly frightening investigation into how technology, posing as reform, is expanding our prison nation into systems of hybrid punishment.”
—Victoria Law, author of Prison by Any Other Name and “Prisons Make us Safer”: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration

“Kilgore’s straightforward prose and clear explanations expose the police state’s relentless expansion into every corner of vulnerable lives. Who pays? Who benefits? Read this book.”
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Change Everything and Golden Gulag

“When I introduced the term e-carceration in 2015, I never imagined the extent to which technology would expand mass incarceration. James Kilgore did. This book offers a re-imagined future for civil rights and abolition in a digital age.”
—Malkia Devich-Cyril, founding director of the Center for Media Justice

From the Publisher

2021-10-26
The author of Understanding Mass Incarcerationreturns with a plaintive critique of the surveillance state.

In addition to conventional prison, writes Kilgore, we now face e-carceration, “the application of a network of punitive technologies to social problems” that “deprive people of their liberty.” These technologies include ankle monitors and other tracking devices as well as security cameras, cellphone tracking, facial-recognition software, and a host of other techniques and tools. They also can be used in ways that are not strictly related to the punishment at hand. As the author explains, e-carceration technologies are often deployed with rules attached that make it difficult if not impossible for the detained to find employment or housing, and, as always, they disfavor ethnic minorities and the poor. All of us are subject to these technologies to one degree or another: It’s been estimated that in London, a walker in the inner city will be photographed 200 times by security cameras in a single day. Kilgore observes that this machine surveillance means that police departments, especially in places that are cash-strapped, can offload the costs of personnel. In one case study, he examines the devolution of the police force in Camden, New Jersey, a place overwhelmingly poor and inhabited by people of color. With surveillance technology in place, policing was essentially outsourced, and the machine fed itself. Camden began issuing citations for camera-recorded petty offenses that skyrocketed from 28,000 in 2013 to 125,000 in 2014, citations that “provided opportunities to collect more data on the local population, which could be fed into the array of local and national databases Camden was joining.” The author makes many significant points, though readers must take into account that he himself is a veteran of the penal system, jailed for crimes committed on the part of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

With some substance, but mostly aid and comfort for the defund-the-police movement.

Kirkus Reviews