Why is it so hard to do nothing?

E-Carceration

More and more people are being subjected to “e-carceration,” aka home confinement enforced through electronic surveillance, usually as a condition of release while awaiting trial. This is generally treated as an administrative measure, yet scholars urge us to think of it as punitive surveillance. Here’s a snapshot, with facts drawn from this recent report by Chicago Appleseed (full of useful charts!): 

Every day in Chicago, thousands of mostly Black and brown men and boys are trapped in their homes, living in fear of being caged, unable to get work, run basic errands, or breathe the outside air. Although designed to be an alternative to caging people in jail, e-carceration is now routinely and increasingly imposed as a condition of release for people who would otherwise just have been released and allowed to live their lives in freedom while fighting their case. From March 2020 to March 2021, the use of electronic monitoring in Chicago's Cook County increased by 49%, with an average 3,652 people monitored daily. The racial disparities are staggering, yet unsurprising: 93% are Black or brown. Ninety-five percent are male.

Chicago isn’t the only place where this pernicious practice is expanding: researchers published an informative op-ed in the L.A. Times on the rise of ankle monitors in L.A., where there’s been a 5,250% increase over the past 6 years.

E-carceration is a dangerous policy because it allows for easy net-widening for who is held in the system (it’s cheap to put people on monitors, because the fees are generally passed on to defendants), the economic/social/psychological costs to individuals and their families are significantly downplayed, and it often serves no legitimate safety purpose. The conditions of this monitoring are so oppressive and so longlasting (with defendants being confined to their homes for over a year in many cases), that people often succumb by pleading guilty. Monitors are expensive, they malfunction, and they prevent people from engaging in key daily tasks like picking up children from school or going to the doctor.

Rather than replacing incarceration with another form of restriction, courts should have a bias in favor of freedom. Yet the political risks and economic benefits of electronically or physically incarcerating people create substantial pressure to expand the use of this harmful practice.

For more information on this topic, the national expert to follow is James Kilgore, with the Challenging E-Carceration project at the Center for Media Justice.

How to subtract 

Many courts operate under rules or settlements that require people to be held under the “least restrictive conditions” when they are awaiting trial. So if someone can be safely released, they should be, and if they don’t need supervision or conditions of release, they shouldn’t have to have them. In practice, DAs and judges tend to ignore the no-conditions / no-supervision option, and instead impose some form of surveillance (such as e-carceration, discussed above) or other restrictive conditions, without any evidence that this has any benefit on public safety. This is one example of a larger phenomenon that pervades courts, prisons, jails, and policy -- it’s extremely hard to get electeds, administrators, and the public to eliminate something (such as a jail stay) without substituting some other form of control. 

Searching for insight, I recently listened to a podcast with UVA engineering professor Leidy Klotz, whose new book Subtract goes into the neuroscience of problem solving, exploring why it’s so hard for humans to solve a problem by taking something away; our first instinct at the most basic brain processing level is to add something. In the podcast, Klotz explores how this is reinforced by social conventions, noting that we tend not to memorialize absence, and that our idea of “improving” things tends to include constructing new things, not deconstructing things. In fact, he claims, the best solution is often to take something away.

This struck me as a powerful force operating against us in the work to end mass incarceration: taking things away is hard. It’s not just hard at the social level; it’s hard at the level of our basic brain functions. Knowing this, we can try to look for workaround and realize that our aversion to subtraction is not rational.

A partial solution: Klotz notes that the cleaning sensation Marie Kondo persuades her audience in part by having them visualize the beauty and peace of the decluttered space, filled with things that spark joy -- the reward at the end of subtraction. That beauty is a form of presence: you will loose stuff, but gain beauty and peace.

Just so, a huge part of our work to end mass incarceration lies in helping the public visualize how the absence of criminalization and punishment infrastructure will be replaced with the presence of other things of great value, like freedom and healing. The runaway success of Emily Galvin-Almanza’s recent tweet on the STAR program in Denver, CO (which replaces police with mental health workers, and has been very effective!), is one of many pieces of evidence that Americans are hungry for these types of solutions that can replace our failing system of incarceration. This hunger for real solutions is part of which keeps me optimistic in this work.