Equal Justice Under Law Co-Signs Letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio to Stop Discriminatory Electronic Monitoring

This month, Equal Justice Under Law co-signed a letter with twenty-five other organizations and sent it to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The letter, authored by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), expresses deep concern about the threats that extensive electronic monitoring pose to individuals’ civil liberties, health, and dignity. 

Although New York is attempting to reform its bail system, the state is expanding its use of electronic monitoring of individuals released pre-trial. It is intended to allow detainees to spend their time awaiting trial outside of jail. However, the wide use of these devices simply extends individuals’ imprisonment to beyond the jail walls. 

In theory, bail schemes exist to ensure that individuals charged with crimes appear in court if they are released prior to their court date. Like many other states, New York’s cash bail system disproportionately kept low-income individuals, often Black and Latinx, behind bars, simply because they could not afford their set bail amounts. However, more affluent individuals charged with the same crimes could pay and be set free.

Bail reform does not achieve its goals by further shackling those it is intended to help through the use of expansive electronic monitoring. These individuals have not yet been convicted of a crime. Furthermore, these threats to individuals’ freedoms are unnecessary and a waste of taxpayer dollars, as individuals released pre-trial without electronic monitoring appear in court and avoid rearrests at the same level as those with electronic monitors. 

Electronic monitors can be stigmatizing and physically and psychologically traumatizing. They can inhibit one’s ability to find employment. Wearers live in constant fear that a dead device battery could mean their arrest. Many devices have even been found to injure users through cuts and bruises, hair loss, headaches, electronic shocks, and inhibiting users’ ability to breathe and cutting off blood circulation.

Additionally, electronic monitoring is capable of tracking an individual’s location with precision in a way that reveals information beyond just the location itself. A location can reveal one’s associations with family members, political and religious organizations, and sexual partners. This expands the impact from one’s general location, to information about their private lives that has no bearing on the likelihood they will show up in court. 

Beyond being unnecessary and stigmatizing, these monitors pose the risk of violating individuals’ Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. They can record calls and conversations without a user’s consent or knowledge. These recordings are not relevant to the monitors’ purposes of ensuring court appearances. Additionally, they may be unlawful in collecting data beyond the scope of one’s location and possibly recording sensitive conversations with one’s attorneys, healthcare providers, and even children.

Electronic monitors, like the cash bail system New York attempted to reform in the first place, disproportionately impacts low income New Yorkers. Confronted with the burden these monitors impose, individuals who are otherwise innocent may be coerced into pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit. 

For all of these reasons, Equal Justice Under Law is proud to support efforts to curtail the extensive usage of electronic monitoring in New York.  You can read the full letter submitted to Mayor Bill de Blasio here.