Incarcerated City

We are too easily seduced by technology and too quick to imagine there must be a technological fix or solution to the deep moral and structural challenges we face.

• If police officers are forced to wear body cameras,
  will this help?
• If we get rid of cash bail and if the people released from jail with electronic ankle monitors,
  will this help?
• If people are sentenced to house arrest for 10 years rather than 3 in prison,
  will this help?

This project is the summary of my thoughts, notes, research, and provocations on electronic ankle monitoring, set within the larger context of the prison industrial complex, punishment, surveillance, and abolition. It’s a project about what happens when the prison extends beyond the traditional prison walls and seeps into your community, your home, and your body. Through these reflections and questions, I tried to identify the connections between PIC and slavery, racism, neoliberalism, urban geography, and technology. I hope you will start to make these connections too, if you haven’t already. Abolition provides us a new path forward, and gives us the opportunity to build a future that revolves around care, healing, and shared community. It’s about knowing and unknowing, learning and unlearning. Abolition allows us to get at the root of the problem, and escape from the same framework and footprint of reform. This project just scratches the surface. I hope these provocations prompt you to question what you know about “crime and punishment” and begin to see things in a new light.

Ruha Benjamin reminds me that it extends even further than this:

She asks, how does carcerality extend even further into the everyday lives who are purportedly free? racialized groups continue to pay much higher price

“Prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition is a political vision, a structural analysis of oppression, and a practical organizing strategy. While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project — “Let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best” — PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more. Things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.”

- Mariame Kaba

• Selling info for profit
• Information security and retention
• What are the restrictions to access the data?
• What are regulations for storage use?
• Who owns your data?
• Where does it go?
• Infringing personal privacy and civil liberties by tracking everyday activities Some devices equipped with two-way microphones
• Unprecedented access to private lives not just of those monitored but also of their friends and family
• BI Incorporated has ability to assign risk scores to behavioural patterns of the monitored
  • judges starting to embrace those risk assessment tools
  • “defendants who have yet to be convicted of an offence in court may be categorized by their future chances of reoffending”

“…[T]he intense movement…forcibly shape the contours of someone’s life – and a family’s life.”

- Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

• Monitored people allowed to seek work may have trouble getting and keeping jobs
• How could one work construction, landscaping or delivery jobs?
• Certain buildings/ warehouses, offices etc. can easily interfere with GPS signals
• What happens when there is unplanned overtime or sudden work schedule changes

“Passing is a practice that some people choose to engage in to ‘manage social stigma, through constructing and enacting a social integration strategy where one presents themselves as what one is not.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

TECHNO-CORRECTIONS

T E C H N O L O G I C A L
E V O L U T I O N

( what if it became as invasive as Facebook or Instagram? )

These apps and alternative options are still turning to technology for a fix and a solution

• ** Be weary of this
• ** Stay alert + stay critical
• ** This is a good time to QUESTION ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING

Promise, in addition to those other apps exemplify what Ruha Benjamin calls “The New Jim Code.”

• They are dangerous. We should be cautious
• They are packaged as reform, as social betterment, as being “better’ for our “public safety”

We need to have a better understanding of:

• The ways urban areas are viewed/affected by technological innovation and change
• Operating jurisdiction of law enforcement
• Spatial awareness and understanding that citizens have of their city, of their neighbourhoods, and of their communities.
• What are our urban boundaries? What are our boundaries of the body, of the home, and of the city?

“Those representations are typically of human beings but presented in terms of physical parameters other than their photographic image. The representation may be a set of changing locational coordinates as in the case of GPS systems that track a parolee/probationer’s movement in space relative to particular coordinates (e.g., a place that the individual must be close to, or conversely is prohibited from approaching). Urban space becomes a set of polygons represented by either a containment area or a forbidden territory for a particular individual for a particular time. The representation of urban space might also be transformed into a set of black and white images in which interest is focused on the whitest of the images because that image depicts a different pattern of thermal energy than its physical surroundings” (Nunn, 2001).

INCREASING VIRTUALITY OF LAW ENFORCEMENT INTELLIGENCE AND TECHNOLOGIES

Other important notes from Samuel Nunn’s paper on urban law enforcement technologies:

• Law enforcement technologies connecting locational coordinates of urban space to physical characteristics of an individual or group
• Biometrics as another layer of monitoring technologies
  • Biometrics focus on:
    1. Residue people leave when they occupy space
    2. Paths people take as they move through space
• Biometrics isolating identity to permit/refuse movement in designated spaces

“Biometric system is largely useless without a broad and deep infrastructure of databases containing catalogs of individual subjects and their biometric parameters. It is the database underlying biometric systems that comprises the standard against which deviations are judged” (274).

So how is it that urban space is programmed into a technological system? Machine systems isolate deviations – for example:

“The parolee moves outside the polygon of movement permitted by the network connected by an ankle bracelet to the GPS system. This deviation is flagged and creates a new communications alert to a parole officer, who must then physically locate the subject in urban space. Or, given the imaging parameters programmed into a FLIR camera mounted on a helicopter patrolling an urban area, the thermal signature of a residence within an urban neighborhood falls outside the normal signature of the surrounding housing units. This deviation is also flagged by a machine which alerts its operators who dispatch patrol units to physically investigate the invisible temperature differential” (274).

What should these thermal patterns look like? What do deviations of these patterns look like?

Urban spaces contain codes that are only decipherable by machinic vision – humans cannot see

What if these machines cannot accurately code what these patterns are?

Nunn provides interesting example:

• “Lovers embracing at the ATM machine may exhibit a pattern consistent with mugging, which in turn prompts the machine system monitor to altern its human monitors to investigate ATM patterns more actively” (275)

“[W]e are indeed creating a new world of urban law enforcement. Do we yet know what life in that world will be like?” (276).

What defines a prison?

• Bars? Steel? Concrete?
• That dull security grey colour?
• A door that locks from the outside only?
• Architecture?
• Eyes on you at all times?
• Cells? Isolation?
• Hands of authority manipulating + hurting you? Rendering you criminal?
• Guards? Prisoners?

These can all take other forms: Forms that may be less easily recognized as the violence they really are

LET’S ASK OURSELVES:

• What does it mean to have every life decision checked by your probation or parole officer?
• What does it mean to have every move tracked and stored?
• What does it mean to be bound by strict curfews, restrictions of all sorts and constraints on whom you spend your time with, where, and how?

Intersecting movements for Black liberation, prison abolition, disability justice, digital justice, trans liberation and m o r e are rising to challenge the structures that underlie prison and envision a new path forward.

We need:

The creation of safe, caring, thriving communities heavily invest in:

We need to invest in:

• Quality schools
• Job creation
• Drug treatment
• Mental health care
• Safe housing for all
• Community + self-governance

• Envisioning a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment
• Demilitarization of schools
• Revitalization of education at all levels
• Health care system (free physical and mental care to all)

The possibilities for abolition are E N D L E S S

• Safe injection sites
• Protests
• Community food banks
• Community garden
• Tent city
• Sex worker organizing