Policing the Borders of An Empire: A Political History of Tagging (1960–2008)

• Main Author: Heyaca, Maria
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: CUNY Academic Works 2023
• Subjects: electronic monitoring; community supervision; behavioral penology; ISAP; punishment; political history; Sociology; Postville
• Online Access: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5366; https://academicworks.cuny.edu/context/gc_etds/article/6422/viewcontent/Policing_the_Borders_of_an_Empire_A_Political_History_of_Tagging_Maria_Heyaca_US_Letter.pdf

Of the nearly 6 million people monitored by the prison and immigration enforcement complex in the US, a little over 4 million, or 70%, are under community supervision. If we narrow in on the nearly 350,000 people being monitored by the immigration system, the figure goes up to 93%. Yet, most studies on criminalization conducted in the US, prioritize confined individuals, neglecting community supervision. In this dissertation, I present the first theoretically driven, historical and sociological analysis that comprehensively targets fundamental questions about the political history of electronic monitoring in the US -- a practice also known as tagging. I concentrate on the understudied and essential period that starts in 1960 with the birth of electronic monitoring and ends in 2008 with the Postville raid, when the federal government first used electronic monitoring to selectively incapacitate a group of Indigenous mothers from Central America. While intended by its developers as a humane alternative to incarceration, electronic monitoring evolved into an expansion rather than a contraction of the carceral continuum and with it, US imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. Drawing on field data and extensive primary sources -- including articles written by the developers of electronic monitoring devices, books, prisoner accounts, congressional hearings, official data and reports, newspaper articles, documentaries, and accounts by people under electronic monitoring surveillance -- I examine three questions: (1) What factors explain why and how electronic monitoring has expanded rather than contracted the carceral continuum? (2) How does electronic monitoring enact US imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy? and (3) What factors led to incorporating electronic monitoring into the immigrant deportation machine? I thread a set of intertwined histories related to the field of power and in particular, to mass incarceration, behavioral science and its use in prison, prison resistance, immigrant criminalization, ...