Designing Stigma: Information, Shame, and the Politics of Electronic Ankle Monitors

• In Event: Innovating, Interrupting & Regenerating the Human-Technology Frontier - I

Abstract

Currently, all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the United States (US) federal government use electronic monitoring devices to surveil people released under probation, parole, and pretrial monitoring programs. In this paper, I argue that the material form of networked information technologies requires scholarly study and policy oversight and regulation equal to that directed at the data gathered and analyzed by these technologies. I support this argument in a case study analysis of electronic ankle monitor’s material form. The politics of data are currently being intensely investigated. The research I present here complements such ongoing lines of investigation through documenting the politics that the material form – the aesthetics of a device’s hardware - can also carry. The article is divided into four parts. First, I provide an overview of the relationship between information, stigma, and social control. Second, I describe what “stigma symbols” are and how they function in society, drawing upon an arresting array of empirical examples. Third, I outline the history and development of electronic ankle monitors. Fourth, and finally, I describe five crucial “echo effects” that electronic ankle monitors’ material form imposes upon their wearers, which expand the harms they experience beyond those incurred from the device’s primary use as a tool of remote law enforcement surveillance. I conclude by noting that ethical oversight and regulation of digital tools cannot apply solely to their data or their physical aesthetics, it must govern both elements of devices simultaneously.

Author

• Lauren Kilgour, Cornell University