Can Electronic Monitoring Fix Mass Incarceration?: Understanding the Role of Electronic Monitoring in Local Policy Reform Efforts

• Main Author: Kirk, Gabriela
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2022
• Subjects: Criminology; Public policy; Sociology
• ISBN: 9798358480247

This dissertation examines the use of electronic monitoring (EM) technologies within the U.S. criminal legal system in the context of broader efforts to reform the system. In the wake of mass incarceration, there is widespread and bipartisan consensus that criminal legal reform and change is necessary and urgent. Across the country, strained budgets and greater public knowledge about the social harms of over-incarceration have weakened the assumption that jail and prison are the best tools to deter and prevent crime. EM has been heralded as one possible solution, argued to be both a cheaper and more humane alternative. While previous scholarship has examined the experience of being supervised on EM, scholars have not examined the actors making decisions about how these programs operate and who should be on them. Drawing on interviews with a variety of policy and legal stakeholders, this project explores the penal and policy logics that motivate the use of EM and the knowledge infrastructures that help to create those motivations. I find due to a lack of clear guidance and research about how EM operates in practice, stakeholders attach various meanings and expectations to the technology. By studying EM, I find evidence for a widening bifurcation of policy and penal logics within the criminal legal system that allows for an expansion rather than a shrinking of the carceral state. The intrusion and surveillance of EM is justified for a wide range of legal-involved individuals because of these multiple logics.