UNDERSTANDING E-CARCERATION

The author of Understanding Mass Incarceration returns 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.