Law enforcement agencies increasingly present high-tech tools like electronic monitoring and pre-trial assessment algorithms as solutions to mass incarceration but these digital tools are false solutions and only amplify the racial bias that already exists in the criminal legal system. What’s worse, we often have very little data about how these tools get used. After years of organizing, we’re beginning to see a change. Illinois will be the first state in the country to regulate electronic monitoring. Once the Illinois reform package takes effect in 2023, an oversight board will publish quarterly data on counties’ use of monitoring — a basic move toward democratizing information. MediaJustice Fellow James Kilgore talks to The Intercept.
“When I asked for states’ analyses of their electronic monitoring, they said they didn’t have anything like that…[Electronic monitoring] is not an alternative to incarceration, but an alternative form of incarceration. We have expanded the footprint of the carceral state by supplementing cages with technology.”
James Kilgore via The Intercept
