On January 27th, domestic violence survivor Marissa Alexander will walk out of Florida’s Duval County jail — but she won’t be free.
Alexander, whose case has gained some notoriety, endured three years of jail time and a year of house arrest while fighting off a prison sentence that would have seen her incarcerated for the rest of her life — all for firing
a warning shot that injured no one to fend off her abusive husband. Like many
black women before her, Alexander was framed as a perpetrator in a clear case of self-defense. In November, as her trial date drew close, Alexander accepted a plea deal that will likely give her credit for time served, requiring her to spend “just” 65 more days in jail. Media coverage of the development suggested that Alexander would soon have her “freedom,” that she would be “coming home.”
Many accounts of the plea deal, however, missed what Alexander will be coming home to: she’ll return to “home detention” — house arrest — for two years.
Such a situation is certainly preferable to being caged in a prison cell. However, does Alexander’s release — and that of others in her shoes — mean freedom? In reality, an ever-growing number of cages are proliferating around us, even if they assume forms that look nothing like our standard idea of a cage.
As mass incarceration is falling out of fashion — it’s been denounced by figures across the political spectrum from
Eric Holder to
Newt Gingrich – a whole slate of “alternatives to incarceration” has arisen. From electronic monitoring and debilitating forms of probation to mandatory drug testing and the sort of “predictive policing” that turns communities of color into open-air prisons, these alternatives are regularly presented as necessary “reforms” for a broken system.
It’s worth remembering, however, that when the modern prison emerged in the late eighteenth century, it, too, was promoted as a “
reform,” a positive replacement for corporal or capital punishment. Early prison reformers — many of them Quakers bent on repentance and redemption — suggested that cutting people off from the rest of the world would bring them closer to God. (The word “penitentiary” comes, of course, from “
penitence.”)
An oppressive version of surveillance played a central role in this vision, as in British reformer Jeremy Bentham’s famed Panopticon, a model prison in which inspectors would be able to view prisoners at any moment, day or night, while themselves remaining invisible. If the
ultimate Panopticon never quite came into existence, Bentham’s idea profoundly influenced the development of the prison as a place in which, for the prisoner, no time or space was inviolable and privacy was a fiction.
As an idea, the Panopticon remains embedded in our notion of state discipline. Now, it is spreading out of the prison and into the neighborhood and the home, which is hardly surprising in a society in which
surveillanceand
monitoring are becoming the accepted norms of everyday life. Like the plans of the early reformers, many current prison “reforms” share a common element: they perpetuate the fantasy that new forms of confinement, isolation, and surveillance will somehow set us all free.
At first glance, these alternatives may seem like a “win-win.” Instead of taking place in a hellish institution, prison happens “in the comfort of your own home” (the ultimate American ad for anything). However, this change threatens to transform the very definition of “home” into one in which privacy, and possibly “comfort” as well, are subtracted from the equation. Perhaps the best example is the electronic monitor, an imprisonment device that is attached to the body at all times.
Electronic Monitoring
House arrest has long been used to quell political resistance. By confining people to their homes, repressive governments are able to weaken an oppositional figure’s ties to the world, while allowing the authorities to know where the confined person is at every moment. From St. Paul to the deposed pro-democracy Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddegh, Galileo to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, dissidents and nonconformists have long watched their homes become their prisons.
However, the rise of new technologies — in particular, electronic monitoring — has allowed the practice of home confinement to become widespread. Nowadays, if you’re under house arrest, there are no longer armed guards circling the premises. Instead, the “guards” are satellites, their gaze always present, and they don’t even blink.
Appropriately enough, electronic monitoring was introduced in
1984. Since then, it has been used for an ever-expanding range of purposes, including pretrial confinement, parole, and probation, or simply as a punishment in and of itself. Monitoring has put new populations under state control, expanding the range of people who are confined in this country. According to an
analysis in the
Journal of Law and Policy, most of those placed on electronic monitors haven’t committed serious or violent offenses and, were it not for monitoring, “at least some of these populations would not in fact be incarcerated or otherwise under physical control.”
In prison, the loss of one’s civil liberties is glaringly apparent. The strip search, the cell sweep, and the surveillance of letters, phone calls, and visits are givens. For those whose homes have been “prisonized,” however, basic constitutional rights also crumble. Probationers and monitorees are subject to
warrantless searches and drug tests; probation officers have ready access to their homes. In fact, though seldom thought of this way, the ankle monitor is essentially a constant, warrantless search.
As research scholar James Kilgore
notes, for those being monitored, “the default position in most instances is house arrest” and therefore they’re often more restricted than their counterparts in jails and prisons. Incarcerated people have daily quotas for calories and are usually granted a certain amount of outdoor exercise time (however miserable the food or outdoor facilities may be). Under house arrest, neither of those protections apply. Similarly, prisoners are usually granted the right to access legal materials; this guarantee is not a given for monitored people.
Even probation officers have acknowledged how monitoring — both the actual physical confinement and the constant knowledge of being watched — seeps into each moment of a confined person’s daily life. A
Department of Justice study, for example, found that, with the visible ankle monitor acting as a “scarlet letter,” those permitted to go to work had a difficult time finding or holding jobs. That’s a problem in itself, since it’s well known that gaining employment is a
crucial step in avoiding future offenses. Full-scale house arrest, however, locks people into a life of stasis and boredom, inhibiting their ability to connect with loved ones or form new bonds — crucial factors in building a sustainable life.
Eighty-nine percent of probation officers surveyed by the Justice Department felt that “offenders’ relationships with their significant others changed because of being monitored.” Both officers and those monitored observed that the ankle band had a distinct impact on children. As one parent testified, “When it beeps, the kids worry about whether the probation officer is coming to take me to jail. The kids run for it when it beeps.” Another noted that his child repeatedly strapped a watch around his ankle “to be like Daddy.”
Beyond the physical and emotional burdens, those under monitoring often pay for their confinement in the most literal possible fashion. As Marissa Alexander discovered in Florida, private companies often exact fees from the people they’re imprisoning. They average around
$10-$15 per day – in addition to installation costs and fees imposed for drug tests or other “services.” Those unable to pay may be re-incarcerated in a cycle that harkens back to debtor’s prison.
By the end of her sentence, Alexander will have spent $16,420 on her own imprisonment and constant surveillance.
Probation and Drug Testing
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