No Child Left Confined: Challenging the Digital Convict Lease

This article is a transcript of a lecture given by Professor Chaz P. Arnett at a Symposium hosted by the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law’s Journal of Health Care Law & Policy. Professor Arnett discusses juvenile courts’ increased reliance on electronic monitoring, which he classifies as “e-carceration,” or the “the digital outsourcing of aspects of prison into communities under the guise of carceral humanism.” Professor Arnett walks through ways in which electronic monitoring worsens race and class disparities in the juvenile legal system: they widen the net of carceral system involvement by extending social control over Black and Latino/a youth; they are overly invasive and restrictive; and they laden families with financial burdens. Professor Arnett cautions that electronic monitoring threatens the healthy development of youth and places digital monitoring within a historical context of racialized surveillance. This resource provides youth defense advocates with a critical race and digital studies framework to challenge the use of electronic monitoring in juvenile courts.