Abstract
This article examines Canada’s immigration and detention system through its newly established alternatives to detention (ATD) program. As a program that relies rather extensively on mobile carceral technologies such as electronic monitoring and voice reporting, I argue that we should consider these alternatives not only as extensions of carceral apparatuses and the detention system but as pervasive, far-reaching, and more abstract manifestations of control and confinement. I introduce the term “techno-carcerality” to theorize how we might understand the shift from traditional modes of confinement to less traditional ones, grounded in mobile, electronic, and digital technologies. I contend that the use of mobile carceral technologies in the context of immigration and detention imposes physical, psychological, spatial, and data-driven modes of control and confinement in private, public, and digital space, which are veiled behind notions and misconceptions of increased freedom, mobility, and autonomy. While the ATD program may offer some better options than those available within detention centers or other carceral institutions, it is a program that involves immense surveillance dataveillance techniques that lead to profound carceral effects and anxieties, affecting everyday life in ways that experientially mimic and transcend conventional confinement.
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