Not on our Watch!

  • Made By CUP With:
  • Community Partners
  • Tags:
  • Immigration,
  • Court System

A fold-out poster that explains how e-carceration works and the impact it has on Black, brown, and immigrant communities.

Community members review a design draft and share feedback at a community session.

Communities across the country are looking for ways to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated or held in detention centers. Authorities like judges, police, and immigration enforcement agents believe that one way to tackle this problem is through a set of technologies and policies known as e-carceration. E-carceration, short for electronic incarceration, is when authorities use surveillance technology like ankle monitors, cameras, and GPS to track and control people in their own communities.

While e-carceration might get some people out from behind bars, the same technology makes it much easier to monitor and punish more people overall. Black, brown, and immigrant communities have become the biggest targets. Having fewer people behind bars, but giving authorities more power to punish communities of color is not a just solution to the problems of mass incarceration.

To help communities understand how e-carceration works and the consequences for Black, brown, and immigrant communities, Freedom to Thrive collaborated with CUP and designers Shreyas R Krishnan and Kruttika Susarla to create Not on our watch! The fold-out poster explains and illustrates the concept of e-carceration and how it perpetuates a system of mass surveillance on communities of color. Available in English and Spanish, Not on our watch! also highlights community actions that have been taken across the country to offer alternatives to our current systems of incarceration and surveillance.

Not on our watch! is being distributed across the country through Freedom to Thrive’s network of organizers and community members.

The project team meets to kick off the collaboration.
Queer Detainee Empowerment Project members give feedback on a design draft.

Check out the Project

The cover and four-page spread from Not on our Watch!

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Project Collaborators

Community Partner

Freedom to Thrive

Daniel Carillo
Basma Eid
Meron Tebeje


Special Thanks

Alex Adames, Jade Jones, María Nóbrega, Jose Olivares, Yasmin Safdié, Christine Gaspar, Leigh Taylor, Gileen Navarro, Pablo Medina Uribe, Willy Alverez, Carlos Casillas, Herbert Garcia, Britany Lopez, Geraldine Monroy, Jorge Lucenzo Montero, Uchechukwu Onwa, Victor Orellona, Edwin Perez, Aneiry Zapata.

And big thanks to the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project for their contributions to this project.

Product Details

8″ × 11″ color pamphlet; unfolds to 22″ × 32″ poster

Funding Support

Support for this project was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.