The Traumas of Juvenile Monitoring
by Emmett Sanders
Walking into the room at a restorative justice hub in Chicago, to interview juveniles who had experienced electronic monitoring, I couldn’t help but reflect upon my own time spent on house arrest as a sixteen year-old. Somehow, that seemed even fresher in my mind than the three months I had just spent on the monitor, following 22 ½ years of incarceration.
I remembered the frustration of being aware of the trap of the system, but powerless to change it. Looking around the room was like traveling through time. I saw myself in their faces. Heard my own story in their words.
“It’s a set up. They don’t want us to succeed,” said the eighteen year-old kid with the electronic shackle on his ankle. “It’s not meant for us to win. I already know this.”
I watched the nods of agreement from the other kids in the room, not one of them old enough to drink a beer, some not even old enough to drive a car. Each had experienced electronic monitoring. Some had been on EM three, four, even five times over the course of their young lives.
To what end? Was there some epiphany they had experienced that would justify the shame of being electronically branded modern-day slaves? Did the strain placed upon families whose resources were already stretched to slivers, and who then had to bear the costs of monitoring, strengthen those families? Did their experiences of being dehumanized, degraded, and in some cases placed in actual physical danger — confined to places of abuse and neglect and forbidden by the state to escape to safety — make them value society more? Did it make them feel as if society valued them at all? Or did it just reinforce the message that they’d been receiving their entire lives?
You don’t matter.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the vast majority of children who find themselves electronically chained to their homes are children of color and overwhelmingly children of poverty. They are the sons and daughters of mass incarceration, who have grown up seeing their fathers and mothers thrown in the back of police cars and stripped from their lives. They are profiled before the age of ten, followed around, stopped and frisked. They turn on the TV and see Tamir Rice gunned down in a park by police before their car even stops, or learn that Trayvon Martin was shot to death by a wannabe security guard who didn’t like his hoodie. They see children who look exactly like themselves murdered with impunity, portrayed as criminals and threats, and are told over and over again that they don’t matter.
So what does it mean when these youth of color find themselves imprisoned in their own homes, an electronic shackle chained to their ankle? It confirms what they already know: that this system is a set up for people like them.
Incarceration is a traumatic experience for adults. For children that trauma is even more severe. Incarcerating children in the home does not negate this trauma; it relocates it, and in some ways makes it even worse.
For one, turning the home into a prison cell for children assumes that the home is a place of safety. This assumption comes from a place of privilege and doesn’t take into account that for some children the home may not be safe. There may be abuse or violence in that home. There may be a real need for that child to be able to escape threatening situations without fear of state retaliation.
Conversely, that home may also be the only safe place these children know. Electronic monitoring compromises the sanctity of that home, especially for a child, and particularly for those who already recognize the many ways the system is set up against them. When the home becomes a place of incarceration for a child, they are being told that there is no hope, no place where they are safe. No place where they will be a child instead of a criminal.
The emotional and psychological effects of being forced to wear the shackle must also be considered. The electronic monitor is the physical embodiment of the way these children are represented to the world. In movies and on television — in the news reports after they are shot dead by the police — they are portrayed as criminals and thugs, spoken of using language one would use to describe animals. These devices are not simply marks of shame and degradation, they reinforce every negative media image of these children. Worse, they don’t simply reinforce it to others, but to the children themselves. This negative self-image combined with the hopelessness of a system set up against them can have devastating and far reaching effects.
No one is unaffected when the home becomes a prison cell, however the effects on children are even more severe and carry with them potential to traumatize in ways those who impose EM rarely consider. Still, juvenile electronic monitoring is widely used, particularly on poor children of color. One attorney who often defends these kids in court in Chicago, where juvenile monitoring is the norm, refers to it as “monitoring poverty.” These kids already know the score. They can see the way the deck is stacked against them, and they aren’t wrong. The truly devastating part is that they don’t even know all of the ways they are right.
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Emmett Sanders is a formerly incarcerated researcher and writer who spent more than 22 years in Illinois prisons. His recent report, “Full Human Beings” argues for incarcerated voter enfranchisement.
