US Spends $20m On Shock Gloves To Force Compliance

The procurement office at Immigration and Customs Enforcement believes it knows something specific: that a device delivering an electric shock to the wrist can substitute, at a cost of twenty million dollars, for the judgment an officer would otherwise have to exercise in the presence of another human being who is frightened, uncomprehending, or simply not moving fast enough. That is the fatal conceit here - not that force is sometimes necessary, which no serious observer denies, but that force can be engineered into a glove and distributed to agents across facilities throughout the United States as though compliance were a technical problem with a technical solution, rather than a relationship between two people, one of whom has almost no information about the other.

Consider what is actually lost. An officer standing in a room with a detainee is, whether he thinks in these terms or not, participating in a feedback process - reading resistance, fear, confusion, injury, language difficulty, and adjusting accordingly. That reading is imperfect, but it is at least responsive to the particular person in front of him. The glove removes the need to read anything. It converts a judgment into a switch. And a switch, once purchased for twenty million dollars, does not remain idle; the agency that owns it will find reasons to justify the expenditure, which means training programs, expanded authorization for its use, and legal defenses built around the premise that the device performed correctly - all of which harden a decision that was, at the point of purchase, a guess about how thousands of individual encounters, none of them yet observed, would actually unfold.

This is the ratchet. The device does not stay contained to the narrow case its planners had in mind. Once agents are equipped, the standard for what justifies its use will be set not by the particular detainee in the room but by the institutional need to justify the acquisition - a need that has nothing to do with the person being shocked and everything to do with the twenty million already spent. Money committed to a designed solution generates its own momentum independent of whether the solution works.

The constitutional question, the one Hayek would insist on asking before the money is spent rather than after, is whether there exists a general rule - applicable to any use of force against a detainee, regardless of the technology involved - that could achieve accountability without requiring ICE to know in advance which of thousands of unrepeatable encounters will warrant which level of coercion. There is such a rule, and it is older than any glove: force must be proportionate, documented, and reviewable by someone outside the chain that ordered it. That rule asks nothing of the agency but restraint and record-keeping. The glove asks it to believe it has solved, in hardware, a problem that only judgment, exercised case by case and checked from outside, has ever been able to answer.