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AbstractElectronic home monitoring (EHM), also known as house arrest, is often described by policy makers as a less punitive, more humane alternative to incarceration. However, studies on its use have found it is often not used as an alternative, but rather as an increase in the level of supervision for individuals in the criminal justice system. This fact calls into question whether the language of alternatives and direct comparisons to incarceration obscures our understanding of both the sanction and how individuals experience it. Although previous studies of the experience of EHM have concluded that individuals do not find the sanction overly burdensome, this article articulates the importance of considering 1) how respondents frame their experience on EHM in comparison to incarceration and 2) how they draw on expectations surrounding their legal alternatives. Using 30 interviews with individuals who have been on EHM in Chicago, Illinois, I argue that the pervasiveness of the prison distorts expectations of the legal process and causes respondents to minimize the hardships they detail. Both the existing framing of studies on EHM and the ways in which individuals experience it demonstrate the hegemony of carceral logics in an era of mass incarceration.

Electronic monitoring, often accompanied with house arrest, is used extensively across the United States as a means of pretrial supervision and as a condition of probation and parole. In this article, we bridge the literatures of procedural punishment and carceral geography to detail how this previously understudied process of transport from jail to electronic monitoring serves not just as a necessary bureaucratic process, but as a key moment of punishment and power. 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.

Neoliberal governance has become a defining feature of our social world, fast‐tracking the commodification of human interaction, particularly within capitalist economies. Neoliberalism's intensification of capitalist social relations shifted social institutions such as education, healthcare, and criminal justice to resemble profit‐oriented enterprises. A preeminent consequence of this shift for the administration of criminal justice is the rapid expansion of monetary sanctions in the form of pay‐to‐stay fees. Our article contributes to scholarship on neoliberal governance and social institutions by exploring how lawmakers justify and frame the imposition and recoupment of pay‐to‐stay fees. We draw from a novel dataset compiled by the authors on pay‐to stay in the state of Illinois, which consists of state‐level pay‐to‐stay statutes, transcripts of legislative debates on the ratification of pay‐to‐stay statutes, and 102 civil complaints from 1997 to 2015 initiated on behalf of the Illinois Department of Corrections against currently and formerly incarcerated people to compel the payment of pay‐to‐stay fees. Our analysis suggests that in the era of neoliberal governance, consumerism is an institutional logic that lawmakers draw from to adopt pay‐to‐stay as a legal template in an effort to foster a producer–consumer relationship between incarcerated people and the state, thereby producing incarceration as a public commodity.