Civil Penalties, Social Consequences by Christopher Mele & Teresa A. Miller

Author:Christopher Mele & Teresa A. Miller [Неизвестный]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-01-10T22:00:00+00:00

9

The Everyday World of House Arrest: Collateral Consequences for Families and Others

WILLIAM G. STAPLES

It’s not just me doing the house arrest but they [his family] feel they’re on house arrest… and that’s unfair to them for what, you know, me being punished, their being punished also, by the phone ringing, by being woke up in the middle of the night, to make sure that I am up and I am on the phone so I don’t get in trouble and have the police coming out here to get me.

—Jeff,1 on living under house arrest

Jeff is a twenty-four-year-old white male who works as a plastics fabricator, one of the twenty-three people I have interviewed living under house arrest in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Jeff has been convicted of driving under the influence (DUI) and a number of misdemeanors, including violating the conditions of his parole. This is his second experience with house arrest. All together, he has spent more than a month being electronically monitored at home, this time following a three-month stint in a residential treatment center. Once on his own, Jeff now lives with his father and grandmother. Being under house arrest means that Jeff needs to respond to random phone calls from a Department of Corrections computer to verify that he is at home when he is scheduled to be. In order to do this, officials have installed a small, computerized unit in the house that is attached to their only phone line. The calls demand that Jeff complete a drill of answering the phone within the first three rings and blowing into an alcohol tester that is built into the machine. While he is doing this, the device takes his picture and compares it to a reference photograph stored on a central computer.

For Jeff, like many of the other house arrest “clients” I spoke with, a sentence to house arrest was characterized, for a variety of reasons, as “better” than the alternative of sitting in the county jail. Yet during our interview, Jeff also expressed frustration and anger at several aspects of his treatment by corrections officials, especially how his sentence to house arrest means that his family is being, in his words, “punished” for something he did. In fact, nearly everyone I spoke with reported that their spouses, lovers, immediate family, roommates, relatives, or others were affected, in various ways, by their sentence to house arrest. These secondary effects or “collateral consequences” (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002) ranged from the inconvenience of not being able to have alcohol in the house; to increased tension and stress in their relationships; to a nearly shared experience of the punishment, discipline, and control that are part of house arrest. These collateral consequences, I argue, are the result of inserting the law, or what Foucault called the “power to punish” (1979), into the social space of the household. Through an examination of these offender narratives, we can see how the penalty of house arrest is made meaningful within the everyday experiences of these individuals and within the complex web of affiliation they share with others.

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