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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.

Previous research shows that people who have criminal legal (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 CL system is highly racialized in the United States, race is central to an analysis of CL contact. In this article, 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 personal perceived injustice is a driving factor in deciding to protest. I also find that non-Black respondents with CL contact are equally as likely to participate in protests as their counterparts without CL contact. This article 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.

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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.