The End of the Ankle “Bracelet”?
by James Kilgore
This is the third of a series of blogs that will explore e-carceration in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic and efforts to get people released from prisons and jails across the country. This series will hone in on specific and emerging trends and changes in e-carceration, such as the development of new devices, the normalization of data gathering and location tracking, the ways in which racism and gender oppression intersect with COVID and public health responses, and the rise of geofencing.
For more than two decades, the ankle shackle has remained the standard electronic monitoring device. Even as cellphones, tablets, smartwatches and laptop computers grew their power, the ankle shackle remained in place, bulging out under socks and scraping skin off criminalized legs.
COVID and decarceration are catalyzing change and bringing growth in cellphone-based monitoring devices like the BISmartLINK and the Guardian, made by Telmate. These devices are versatile technologies, downloadable to a personal phone or a dedicated company device. As with their ankle-based predecessors, no body of research or evidence verifies their effectiveness.
The New Monitors
BI, the nation’s largest electronic monitoring company, is the market leader in cellphone-based devices. While BI still produces traditional ankle monitors, the SmartLINK app is their frontrunner into the future. SmartLINK is already the go-to device for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As of May 16, BI had over 20,000 people under ICE supervision on the SmartLINK, nearly double the figure for June 2019. While SmartLINK claims to offer services like court date reminders and lists of local resources, as researcher Mark Latonero notes, these devices can be just as easily used to “track, surveil, discriminate and stigmatize.” Since the start of shelter-in-place, Illinois parole agents have been ordering clients who were not under electronic monitoring to download the SmartLINK app to their personal phone. In a state where Black people comprise 15% of the population but 58% of those on parole, this app will be all about discrimination, stigmatization and new twists on punishment.
The Guardian, whose parent company is prison phone profiteer GTL, has similar capacities. Those under supervision can be prompted any time of day to read a series of numbers into the screen. The phone processes that interchange to determine if the person on the monitor is in the “right” place. The Guardian also claims to have a “solution for community corrections.” Once downloaded, it has the capacity pick up ambient sound, adding another dimension of techno-invasion.
Acivilate and Promise offer a different sort of branding, fully in line with the notion of carceral humanism. While SmartLINK and Telmate struggle to re-brand themselves as solution providers rather than incarcerators, Acivilate and Promise don’t carry that historical baggage. They emerged from the Obama years when providing “alternatives” to incarceration began to mainstream. Acivilate stands firm in its dedication to use technology to “break the cycle” of recidivism. Their Pokket cloud service doesn’t supervise- it focuses on “safely sharing information”, providing the parole officer with the “full context of the client’s progress and challenges.” Promise, launched via a capital injection from seven investors including Jay-Z’s ROC NATION, offers “evidence-based, results-focused” technology and claims a strong “commitment to the public sector.” While not mentioning Promise explicitly, Jay-Z penned a Time magazine op-ed that coincided with the launch of the app in which he claimed to be “taking on the exploitative bail industry.” He even cited the work of abolitionist thought leader Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Ava DuVernay’s documentary film, “The 13th”, in positioning himself in the struggle.
In a state where Black people comprise 15% of the population but 58% of those on parole, this app will be all about discrimination, stigmatization and new twists on punishment.
In addition to the aforementioned four companies, other firms, like Reconnect and Sierra Wireless, are quietly taking advantage of a COVID moment where the wolf of surveillance dresses in the sheep’s clothing of public health to initiate unregulated data gathering processes. Meanwhile, Attenti, a veteran player in the EM game has simply renamed their ankle shackle as a “quarantine management system.”
Other firms, like Reconnect and Sierra Wireless, are quietly taking advantage of a COVID moment where the wolf of surveillance dresses in the sheep’s clothing of public health to initiate unregulated data gathering processes.
The End of the Ankle Shackle?
At this moment, these virtual mass supervision tools are in sync with the tectonic shifts forced down our collective throats due to COVID. Seemingly overnight, we have witnessed massive moves to online instruction in schools and universities, to telehealth, and to running all kinds of meetings and social gatherings through applications like Zoom. These often manifest as services necessary to public health but, while perhaps serving some anti-coronavirus spread function, will ultimately emerge as data-gathering opportunities. These emerging opportunities are chances to restructure the economy to give more power and control to Big Tech and certain elements of the state. These new electronic monitoring apps are keeping up with these changes. They do monitor location but BISmartLINK and Promise, in the end, will grab our biometrics, putting them into algorithms that determine our risk level and outcomes. For Black and Latinx people and others in marginalized and criminalized communities, such data acts as a weapon, not a support. The cellphone or even the computer chip are much more potent weapons on this battlefield than an ankle monitor.
This is the moment people like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have been waiting for. In a talk given to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence in 2018, Schmidt outlined his vision of the techno-future. For Schmidt and his tech world buddies, the lethal COVID-19 virus has become the great enabler. This vision shifts control to the tech world, channeling profits and decision-making up the corporate ladder while disposable and semi-disposable workers of color deliver healthcare and Amazon packages to the comfortable classes.
For Black and Latinx people and others in marginalized and criminalized communities, such data acts as a weapon, not a support.
We at MediaJustice have long called for resisting electronic monitors in all forms, but the struggle has become much larger. As author Simone Browne has reminded us, there is a long history of the state surveilling Black people and other marginalized groups. She calls for people to claim ownership of their data by organizing and developing a critical biometric consciousness, an awareness of how companies and the racial capitalist state appropriate the data of criminalized bodies for profit and political gain. Developing that consciousness and building on it in opposition to the power of the surveillance state is now what it means to challenge e-carceration.
James Kilgore is an activist and researcher based in Urbana, Illinois. He is currently a Fellow at MediaJustice, the Director of the Challenging E-Carceration Project, and Co-Director of FirstFollowers Reentry Program. He is also a member of the Illinois Coalition to Challenge Electronic Monitoring.
