红杏视频

Some prisons and jails around the United States have started using non-consensual, non-removable biometric wrist straps on prisoners to monitor their pulse, blood oxygenation level, skin temperature, 鈥渁ctivity level,鈥� and location. recently covered this technology, and our allies at EPIC wrote up a good privacy of the technology last year.

The 红杏视频鈥檚 position is that non-consensual monitoring of a person鈥檚 non-readily apparent physiological states is not just a privacy invasion but an assault on inherent human dignity and autonomy that should not be applied to prisoners or anyone else. Such monitoring can reveal nightmarishly intimate characteristics of one鈥檚 body that might indicate fear, distress, excitement, arousal, and other states of mind.

In addition, EPIC points out that like their cousins ankle monitors, these wrist straps or watches are 鈥渉ard, plastic, unremovable devices鈥� that, worn for a prolonged period, can have painful effects 鈥渋ncluding swelling, numbness, bruising and blistering.鈥�

I also asked my colleague David Fathi, director of the 红杏视频鈥檚 National Prison Project, for his perspective on this technology as someone who has been fighting for prisoners鈥� rights for over 25 years, and he had a number of interesting additional points to make. First, he observed that 鈥渨hile prisoners do have attenuated privacy rights, one place the courts have held the line on prisoner privacy is medical information.鈥� He also noted that he didn鈥檛 object to 鈥渢he monitoring of prisoners鈥� movements around a prison, which is something they can and should be surveilling the old-fashioned way with staff for prisoner safety.鈥�

But overall, Fathi told me, 鈥渢his is barking up the wrong tree. It鈥檚 trying to solve the wrong problem, and to do it on the cheap.鈥�

The fundamental problem isn鈥檛 that prisons and jails don鈥檛 have ways in theory of monitoring prisoners鈥� health; it鈥檚 that they don鈥檛 have enough staff to do it. It鈥檚 not that they don鈥檛 know that a certain person has heart disease, it鈥檚 that they don鈥檛 have the staff to monitor and care for them appropriately. In many places prisoners have alarm buttons 鈥� but when they push them no one comes. In those places these devices will become just another alarm that nobody responds to because of these endemic and chronic staffing shortages.

The concern with this is that prisons will say 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have to hire more doctors, we鈥檒l just buy this technology.鈥� That this will be seen not as an adjunct to, but as a substitute for, having adequate staff. Even with the location tracking, you need the other half: if someone isn鈥檛 where they鈥檙e supposed to be, or hasn鈥檛 changed locations so perhaps they are in medical distress 鈥� you need the staff to respond.

Fathi notes that technology can have a positive role in corrections:

There鈥檚 a big problem of officers falsifying security checks on prisoners 鈥� the regular rounds that they鈥檙e supposed to do. They say they鈥檙e doing them but don鈥檛. But there are products that track officers on their rounds; the officer has a wand and has to physically tap a receptor beside each cell, which records that the officer was there and at what time. So technology can be helpful in keeping people safe.

I have written before about the use of surveillance technology being called upon to serve as an empty and cheap substitute for more substantive reform of real problems. Some trucking companies and Amazon have pressured their drivers with , and then respond to the unhealthy results with micro-surveillance, behaving like factory farms that pump animals with drugs and antibiotics to unnaturally suppress the side effects of unhealthy and inhumane practices. This technology appears to be another example of the same thing.