Surveilling Sureties: How Privately Mediated Monetary Sanctions Enroll and Responsibilize Families

Abstract

In the neoliberal age, ordinary people are increasingly responsible for taking up crime control and surveillance, what we might consider traditional state functions. This article situates commercial bail as a case of responsibilization and identifies monetary sanctions as a mechanism through which private companies offload pretrial risk management onto families. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I present this process via four stages. First, agents use cosigned bail bonds to selectively enroll people they perceive as suitable sureties and surveillants. Second, this monetary sanction is deployed with carceral and financial threats to encourage cosigners to embody the roles. Third, as surveillants, family members engage in invisible emotional labor to cope with or rationalize their deployment as an arm of the state. Last, through their involvement as instruments of surveillance, family members inadvertently become subjects of surveillance and carceral control. From enrollment to subjugation, this process of responsibilization is an uneven one as women, particularly women of color, are disproportionately burdened with risk management and any resulting repercussions.