According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the cost of
keeping people in jails and prisons soared to $87 billion in 2015 from $19
billion in 1980, in current dollars.
In recent years, politicians on both sides of the aisle have
joined criminal-justice reformers in recognizing mass incarceration as both a
moral outrage and a fiscal sinkhole. As ankle bracelets have become compact and
cost-effective, legislators have embraced them as an enlightened alternative.
More than 125,000 people in the criminal-justice system were supervised with
monitors in 2015, compared with just 53,000 people in 2005, according to
the Pew Charitable Trusts. Although no current national tally is available,
data from several cities — Austin, Texas; Indianapolis; Chicago; and San
Francisco — show that this number continues to rise.
Last December, the First Step Act, which includes provisions
for home detention, was signed into law by President Donald Trump with support
from the private prison giants GEO Group and CoreCivic. These corporations
dominate the so-called community-corrections market — services such as
day-reporting and electronic monitoring — that represents one of the
fastest-growing revenue sectors of their industry.
By far the most decisive factor promoting the expansion of
monitors is the financial one. The United States government pays for monitors
for some of those in the federal criminal-justice system and for tens of
thousands of immigrants supervised by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But
states and cities, which incur around 90% of the expenditures for jails and
prisons, are increasingly passing the financial burden of the devices onto
those who wear them. It costs St. Louis roughly $90 a day to detain a person
awaiting trial in the Workhouse, where in 2017 the average stay was 291 days.
When individuals pay EMASS $10 a day for their own supervision, it costs the
city nothing. A 2014 study by
NPR and the Brennan Center found that, with the exception of Hawaii, every
state required people to pay at least part of the costs associated with GPS
monitoring. Some probation offices and sheriffs run their own monitoring
programs — renting the equipment from manufacturers, hiring staff and
collecting fees directly from participants. Others have outsourced the
supervision of defendants, parolees and probationers to private companies.
“There are a lot of judges who reflexively put people on
monitors, without making much of a pretense of seriously weighing it at all,”
said Chris Albin-Lackey, a senior legal adviser with Human Rights Watch who has
researched private-supervision companies. “The limiting factor is the cost it
might impose on the public, but when that expense is sourced out, even that
minimal brake on judicial discretion goes out the window.”
Nowhere is the pressure to adopt monitors more pronounced
than in places like St. Louis: cash-strapped municipalities with large
populations of people awaiting trial. Nationwide on any given day, half a
million people sit in crowded and expensive jails because, like Daehaun White,
they cannot purchase their freedom.
As the movement to overhaul cash bail has challenged the
constitutionality of jailing these defendants, judges and sheriffs have turned
to monitors as an appealing substitute. In San Francisco, the number of people
released from jail onto electronic monitors tripled after
a 2018 ruling forced courts to release more defendants without bail. In Marion
County, Indiana, where jail overcrowding is routine, roughly 5,000 defendants
were put on monitors last year. “You would be hard-pressed to find bail-reform
legislation in any state that does not include the possibility of electronic
monitoring,” said Robin Steinberg, the chief executive of the Bail Project.
Yet like the system of wealth-based detention they are meant
to help reform, ankle monitors often place poor people in special jeopardy.
Across the country, defendants who have not been convicted of a crime are put
on “offender funded” payment plans for monitors that sometimes cost more than
their bail. And unlike bail, they don’t get the payment back, even if they’re
found innocent. Although a federal survey shows
that nearly 40% of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to cover an
emergency, companies and courts routinely threaten to lock up defendants if
they fall behind on payment. In Greenville, South Carolina, pretrial defendants
can be sent back to jail when they fall three weeks behind on fees. (An officer
for the Greenville County Detention Center defended this practice on the
grounds that participants agree to the costs in advance.) In Mohave County,
Arizona, pretrial defendants charged with sex offenses have faced rearrest if
they fail to pay for their monitors, even if they prove that they can’t afford
them. “We risk replacing an unjust cash-bail system,” Steinberg said, “with one
just as unfair, inhumane and unnecessary.”
Many local judges, including in St. Louis, do not conduct
hearings on a defendant’s ability to pay for private supervision before
assigning them to it; those who do often overestimate poor people’s financial
means. Without judicial oversight, defendants are vulnerable to
private-supervision companies that set their own rates and charge interest when
someone can’t pay up front. Some companies even give their employees bonuses
for hitting collection targets.
It’s not only debt that can send defendants back to jail.
People who may not otherwise be candidates for incarceration can be punished
for breaking the lifestyle rules that come with the devices. A survey in
California found that juveniles awaiting trial or on probation face especially
difficult rules; in one county, juveniles on monitors were asked to follow more
than 50 restrictions, including not participating “in any social activity.” For
this reason, many advocates describe electronic monitoring as a
“net-widener": Far from serving as an alternative to incarceration, it
ends up sweeping more people into the system.
To read more CLICK HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment