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Abstract
At present, the politics of digital tools are predominantly discussed in terms of the data they collect, analyze, and circulate. Through my analysis of electronic ankle monitors’ visual characteristics, I widen the scope of investigation to consider how the visuality of digital tools’ form factor – the size and shape of computing hardware – also contributes to their politics. I discuss five major impacts the visuality of electronic ankle monitors’ physical form has upon their wearers’ lives: (1) lack of differentiation in the aesthetics of monitors across different types of wearers (spanning from criminal justice to immigration detention) leads wearers to be considered “dangerous criminals,” by default; (2) monitors limit wearers’ ability to “pass” in society; (3) monitors expand the set of surveillors beyond government officials to also include the public; (4) monitors compromise wearers’ privacy; (5) monitors associate wearers with older practices of visually marking people normative society has labeled dangerous. Based on this analysis, I argue two points. First, that the visuality of electronic ankle monitors’ form factor expands the harms wearers experience beyond those engendered by the device’s primary use as a remote geo-temporal tracking tool used by government organizations. Second, the case study of electronic ankle monitors evidences the need to develop laws and policies that seek to regulate the visual properties of digital tools as well as the data they generate.
Notes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank Karen Levy for her invaluable feedback; and, generous colleagues in Cornell's Department of Computer and Information Science, the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) community, and the Innovation Society at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU-Berlin, Germany) for thoughtful comments shared during the writing and revision of this article.
Notes
1 Throughout the article, I use the term “wearers” when broadly describing people who are required to wear electronic ankle monitors for various different reasons. In many ways, this term is not satisfactory because it flattens the diverse social actors who are required to wear electronic ankle monitors into one category. Thus, at the outset of this article, I would like to explain, not excuse, the reasoning for using this term. It is an example of how our very language, our terms of analysis, can fall short of our analytic endeavors. For more on the politics of language, see Murphy 2017 (135-145). It is my hope that this article will lead to more sophisticated language in future as research regarding the social impacts of electronic ankle monitors continues to develop.
2 Critically, these figures do not capture the complete picture of ankle monitor use in the US, as they do not include the growing number of people required to wear electronic ankle monitors after being released from immigration detention centers while they await their immigration hearing (Pew 2016). (accessed on September 1, 2016).
3 The lack of visual differentiation amongst available models on the market and how they are used interchangeably across justice and immigration contexts, invites the observation that the lack of visual differentiation may be intentional rather than accidental. If true, such an intentional lack of differentiation could be directed at carrying out a modern form of public punishment in the Durkheimian sense – upholding moral order and performing the power of the state (Garland Citation1991). However, at present, data to investigate this does not exist.
4 Accounting of the harms the recognizability of this device introduces into the lives of the people who wear monitors has not been seen a site of intellectual or financial investment, suggesting that the challenges imposed upon wearers by the devices’ aesthetics are considered acceptable to governmental actors who make decisions with regard to their use. This is in striking contrast to other efforts to obscure visual marks that might prompt prejudicial treatment of justice-involved people.
5 M.M.’s reflections on their experience with wearing an electronic ankle monitor were published by The Marshall Project, a non-profit online journalism organization co-founded by Bill Keller, former New York Times executive editor, and colleagues. M.M. requested that only initials be used for authorship so as not to violate their parole terms. At the time of publication, M.M., a full-time student and an employee of a New York City law firm, was in his fourth year of parole because of an arrest at age 22 and a subsequent driving under the influence (D.U.I.) re-arrest (editor’s note in M. M. 2015, n. p.).
6 While much research examines how change relates to politics (e.g., the adoption of electronic monitoring systems in the trucking industry, see Levy Citation2015), the development of oral contraceptives for women and not men (Oudshoorn 2003), in this case I argue that fixity – the lack of change in how electronic ankle monitors look – also communicates deeply-rooted social politics.
7 See Shinohara and Wobbrock Citation2011 for examples related to assistive technology.
9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_of_shame#/media/File:Mask_of_shame.jpg (accessed on January 1, 2018).
10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scold%27s_bridle#/media/File:Scoldengravingalpha.jpg
(accessed on January 1, 2018).
11 https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Punishment.jsp (accessed on August 1, 2019).
12 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_history_of_slavery_and_the_slave_trade,_ancient_and_modern_-_the_forms_of_slavery_that_prevailed_in_ancient_nations,_particularly_in_Greece_and_Rome;_the_African_slave_trade_and_the_political_(14598547047).jpg. (accessed on August 1, 2019).
13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scourged_back_by_McPherson_%26_Oliver,_1863,_retouched.jpg (accessed on August 1, 2019).
14 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017350/mediaviewer/rm4008705536 (accessed in March 2020).