Understanding E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring, the Surveillance State, and the Future of Mass Incarceration

A riveting primer on the growing trend of surveillance, monitoring, and control that is extending our prison system beyond physical walls and into a dark future--by the prize-winning author of Understanding Mass Incarceration

"James Kilgore is one of my favorite commentators regarding the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the necessity of pursuing truly transformative change." --Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

During the last decade, as consensus has grown that mass incarceration is morally reprehensible, financially unsustainable, and politically unviable, criminal justice reforms that release prisoners from actual prisons have been nearly universally embraced. But as educator, author, and formerly incarcerated activist James Kilgore brilliantly exposes, these reforms are largely a part of the phenomenon of e-carceration--the slow, sinister way that technological interventions are expanding to increasingly and creatively deprive justice-involved people and other marginalized groups of their freedoms, all in the name of ending mass incarceration.

People subject to the constraints of e-carceration can be denied access to employment, housing, medical treatment, therapy, and even the opportunity to spend time with their families. The harm caused by data harvesting, which involves the collection and storage of data, has no time boundaries. Certain e-carceration technologies, like facial recognition, persist even without the knowledge of their subjects. And sometimes, people may be accidentally complicit in the intensification of their own e-carceration by adding data and information to databases used to predict behavior and authorize official responses.

In this searing and powerful work, Kilgore examines the dark side of this evolution of mass incarceration, from the simple analog-like ankle shackle to the great corporate data clouds in the sky--and offers a way forward.