“That’s what prison is about—it’s about tapping into the meager resources of the poorest and most oppressed sector of the population and making them pay to incarcerate themselves.”

Today on the show, Thursday host Allen Ruff continues his two-part series on incarceration by talking with former prisoner and prison abolitionist James Kilgore about his new book, Understanding E-Carceration.

They talk about what e-carceration is, the technology that powers electronic monitoring (and the people who profit from it), the risk assessment tools used in the criminal legal system, and the surveillance that brings the oppression of the prison system into people’s homes.

James Kilgore is an activist, researcher, and writer based in Urbana, Illinois, where he has lived since paroling from prison in 2009. He is the director of the Challenging E-Carceration project at MediaJustice and the co-director of FirstFollowers Reentry Program in Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of five books, including Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time (The New Press, 2015) and Understanding E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring, the Surveillance State, and the Future of Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2022).

Cover photo by Dominic Sagar, 2015, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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