Chris. Father of 3 in Chicago. Couldn't even go outside bc of electronic monitoring. No walks. Errands. Not even the doctor when his son broke his arm. In August, his mom had to go to hospital so he *had* to pick up kids. Arrested. Now jailed. During COVID.themarshallproject.org/2020/11/22/whe…
During COVID, the alternative to jail for disproportionately Black & Brown communities: "Expanded use of home confinement & electronic monitoring, especially for pretrial defendants who have not been convicted & who would not be confined at all if they could afford bail."
"In Chicago, an epicenter of the rise in surveillance, the number of people on electronic monitoring jumped from 2,417 before the pandemic to 3,365 by mid-June and has remained in that range. At one point, the agency ran out of ankle bracelets."
"Because surveillance is seen as more humane than jail, judges are putting more people on it than they ever would have locked up. That trend, which has particularly affected the Black community, has been exacerbated by the pandemic & will only continue after it is over."
"Darryl, 23, said the radius he was required to stay within was just 15 feet. If he so much as took out the trash, the box that was locked onto his ankle would start ringing and flashing red—and he’d be flooded with fear, desperate not to be sent back to jail."
"Electronic monitoring makes it nearly impossible to get & hold onto a job, especially after employers receive a call from law enforcement to approve movement. It pressures people to plead even if they believe they are innocent, just to get their ankle bracelet taken off."
Public Defender Cathryn Crawford: “We had hoped that judges and electronic monitoring officers would for the first time understand how oppressive being confined in your home is—because a lot of them are now going through a version of that themselves."
"For Chris, being on house arrest during the pandemic was like “having double claustrophobia. In a way, being in jail now is a less psychologically confusing experience. “At least here,” he said, “you know that you are not free.”
Electronic monitoring, even more so during the pandemic, is oppressive, unjust, and unnecessary.
https://twitter.com/ziibiing/status/1330863914293354498?s=20
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