RESEARCH

BOOK PROJECT

Freed Without Freedom: Surveillance,Citizenship, and the Presumption of Guilt

(Under Contract with NYU Press)

Erin’s current book project looks at the experiences of surveillance for people on pretrial release. She considers how access to citizenship rights is obfuscated for people charged with a crime in Chicago’s Cook County. Her findings are grounded in three data sources: an historical archive of pretrial policy at the county-, state-, and federal-levels; ethnographic observations in Cook County’s central criminal courthouse; and 58 in-depth interviews conducted with people on pretrial release. She builds on literatures of poverty governance, carceral citizenship, and the politics of survival to show how people awaiting trial experience and resist punitive conditions. Her findings illustrate how the presumption of innocence is stratified by race and class.

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES

Harris, Jacob. Kaitlyn Sims, John Eason, Louis Chuang, Victoria Ylizaliturri, Isabel Anadon, and Erin Eife. Forthcoming. “The Prison Bust: Declining Carcral Capacity in an Era of Mass Incarceration.” Punishment & Society.

While there is a growing literature investigating the causes and consequences of the US prison boom—the tripling of prison facilities between 1970 and 2000—much less is known about current patterns of prison closures. We use novel data capturing the universe of prison closures (N=188) from 2000 to 2022 to identify and characterize what we term “the prison bust”—the period since 2000 when prison closures began to climb and eventually eclipse new prison building. We show that the prison bust is, in part, a consequence of development-oriented prison-building policies that aggressively used prisons to stimulate struggling local economies. The bust is primarily concentrated in the counties that pursued prison building most aggressively, reflecting a highly cyclical and reactionary pattern of prison placement and closure. We also show that, relative to counties with at least one prison but no closures, closures are concentrated in metro counties with stronger local economies and multiple prisons. Overall, we highlight the prison bust as an important new era in the history of US punishment and provide a new dataset for investigating its causes and consequences. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.

Eife, Erin and Beth E. Richie. OnlineFirst. “Punishment By Association: The Burden of Attending Court for Legal Bystanders.” Law and Social Inquiry.

Scholars have shown how legal bystanders experience punishment at the hands of the state in their homes and neighborhoods, as well as jails and prisons. Other scholars have shown how bureaucratic processes, such as attending court, are punitive toward people charged with crimes. There is less information about how legal bystanders also experience punishment in courtrooms. In this article, we bridge the literatures between secondary prisonization and procedural punishment to illustrate how legal bystanders, such as family and friends of bond court defendants, experience punishment when attending bond court. We utilize courtroom ethnography of Central Bond Court in Chicago’s Cook County and interviews with family and friends of people charged with a crime to illustrate this form of punishment in three themes: extraction, destabilization, and degradation. With these findings, we argue that secondary prisonization begins not at the point of incarceration, but at the moment a loved one’s contact with the criminal legal system begins.

Eife, Erin. 2021. “No Justice, No Peace?: Protest Participation for People with Criminal Legal Contact.” Social Currents.

Previous research shows that people who have criminal legal contact (CL contact) are less likely to vote, but there is little information about whether or not CL contact influences protest participation. While people with CL contact may be more likely to engage in critiques of the state, they are also more vulnerable to the risks associated with protesting. Because the criminal legal system is highly racialized in the United States, race is central to an analysis of CL contact. In this paper, I analyze the relationship between protest participation, CL contact, and race in Illinois. With survey data from the 2014 Chicago Area Study, I show how race and CL contact interact to increase the likelihood of protesting for Black respondents with CL contact, suggesting that one’s experience of a perceived injustice is a driving factor in deciding to protest. I also find that people with CL contact, overall, are equally as likely to participate in protests as their counterparts and that membership in civil society organizations increases likelihood of protest participation. This paper contributes to literature on political participation and criminology, showing how race and CL contact interact in a way that is associated with participation rates for protest.

Eife, Erin and Gabriela Kirk (equal authorship). 2021. “And you will wait’: Carceral Transportation in Electronic Monitoring as Part of the Punishment Process.” Punishment & Society

Scholars have previously detailed the ways in which punishment occurs through bureaucratic processes. While not typically conceptualized as part of one’s sentence, transportation between different carceral spaces has been shown to have punitive effects. In this article, we focus on an unexamined aspect of carceral transport: from jail to electronic monitoring. A growing sanction in the U.S., electronic monitoring (EM) has been heralded as a way for individuals to avoid the physical and emotional trauma of jail. Scholarly work on the experience of individuals placed on EM is limited to time spent within the residence itself, ignoring the importance of other moments of punishment. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 60 people who were currently or recently on EM in Cook County, IL, we argue that this moment of transport is itself a punitive experience. We find that sheriff’s officers involved in the transport process punish individuals through the manipulation of time and space, verbal threats, and infantilization. This punishment in transport instills a subjugated status that sets the tone for the EM experience, aiding in reinforcing the home as the new carceral space.

Richie, Beth E. and Erin Eife. 2020. “Black Bodies at the Dangerous Intersection of Gender Violence and Mass Criminalization.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma.

While considerable attention has been given to the ways that intimate partner violence impacts women, the prevailing analyses have not sufficiently attended to the range of social consequences that have particularly deleterious effects on marginalized groups. Part of what is missing in this analytical gap is attention to the negative effect of racialized criminalization and incarceration of women who have experienced gender-based violence. For this reason, this article will make the link between gender violence against Black women and the forces that have led to their over-criminalization. Following a brief review of the current statistics on rape, battering, stalking, emotional manipulation, and other forms of abuse, we will present data on arrest and incarceration rates of Black women in the U.S. Then, a case history will be used to illustrate how the two dangerous trends are linked. The article will conclude with theoretical analyses of the linkages and strategic recommendations for change.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Eife, Erin. 2021. “Electronic Monitoring during Pretrial Release.” American Society of Criminology’s Division on Corrections and Sentencing Handbook, Volume 6

With the recent wave of policy changes occurring throughout the United States around pretrial detention and money bond, there has been an increase in the number of people released while awaiting trial. This has led to a concomitant increase in measures of surveillance amongst people accused of a crime including, most notably, a rise in the rates of pretrial electronic monitoring. In this chapter, I summarize the current state of policy on electronic monitoring usage in the United States and, owing to the significant variations across local context, then devote attention to case studies of specific cities and counties including Chicago/Cook County, Illinois; Alameda County, California; Allegheny County, Pennsylvania; and Marion County, Indiana. Doing so allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the processes and mechanisms at play in this relatively recent phenomenon. I then move to an argument on why this shift to electronic monitoring in place of pretrial detention is just as harmful and continues to obfuscate the presumption of innocence. Specifically, I utilize interview data with people on electronic monitoring during pretrial release to argue that the shift to electronic monitoring is another form of incarceration. This widens the net of carcerality as opposed to promoting an end to mass incarceration. Lastly, I call for research questions and projects that can further enlighten this new, important, and growing phenomenon.

Scott-Hayward, Christine and Erin Eife. 2021. “Correctional and Sentencing Law Commentary: Electronic Monitoring” Criminal Law Bulletin. 57(3).

Electronic monitoring (EM) is a method of surveilling and tracking people under the supervision of the criminal legal system, typically using an ankle bracelet. Most people on EM are tracked using a GPS device, which uses global positioning systems to constantly track the location of the person being surveilled, whether inside or outside a residence. Although diminishing in popularity, many people, particularly those subject to home confinement or house arrest, are monitored using radio frequency (RF) devices; these devices measure whether the individual on EM is within the home monitoring unit’s range. This commentary examines the regulation and operation of EM in the criminal legal system. Part II reviews the law governing EM, including its imposition by courts and supervision agencies, as well as several key legal issues. Part III discusses the costs and consequences of EM, while Part IV reviews the effectiveness of EM.