Fetters

 The Guardian ran a piece yesterday on the increasingly widespread practice of requiring asylum-seekers in the United States to wear electronic ankle monitors—aptly described by advocates as "shackles"—as an alternative to being detained within four walls. As the Biden administration promises eventually to wind down the "Title 42" policy—which involves the summary expulsion of asylum-seekers without a screening, in violation of international refugee covenants—fears were they might turn to arbitrary long-term detention instead. Faced with this prospect, the growing use of a mobile app to monitor asylum-seekers' movements inside the United States, and increased reliance on electronic surveillance via ankle shackles, may seem like relatively humane alternatives. 

Yesterday's report calls this into question. Let us leave untested and unchallenged for today the assumption that the movement of people across borders needs to be policed at all; the idea that asylum-seekers should be presumptively constrained in their movements; that states can legitimately interfere with the physical liberty of people who have done nothing wrong, simply presenting themselves for an asylum hearing in accordance with their rights under international law. (If we think it odd the French government held refugees fleeing fascist persecution in concentration camps in the 1930s, as depicted in Anna Seghers' Transit, why should we tolerate the same practice today, from the U.S. immigration detention system, to Australian offshore detention camps... but enough! enough!)

Suppose we set all of that aside. What can be said about the use of the ankle shackles themselves? Are they humane? The report describes cases of people being accidentally shocked, of being unable to sleep—seeing as they are not permitted to remove the objects even to shower, even to go to bed at night. Are they effective? The report recounts instances in which the technology transmitted completely false information, reporting people as absent and triggering ICE involvement when they were actually sitting at home. Are they necessary? The article alleges equivalent or higher rates of participation in court hearings for people with legal representation who are living in freedom. So what then is the point of this technology? One interviewee perhaps comes closest to it when they say: "[it's] a modern day scarlet letter."

After all, the purpose of shackling from its invention to the present has never actually been to forestall escape. It has, to the contrary, been a quite literal stigma. It has been about constituting a punishment in itself, by visibly marking someone as a member of a criminalized caste. I was reminded in reading the article of a passage from Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans.). In speaking of the Czarist prison authorities' practice of shackling inmates even while they are stricken with consumption, he asks: "[C]an it be that they put a man in fetters only so that he won't escape or so as to hinder him from escaping? Not at all. Fetters are simply a dishonor, a shame and a burden, physical and moral [.... T]hey are prescribed [...] only as a punishment[.]" 

So we see that here, as in so many domains of our immigration system, to quote Adam Serwer: "the cruelty is the point."