This website is for a course named "In\Visible St. Louis: People, Place and Power in the Divided City" (catalog number SOC 4930) offered through a joint collaboration between the Department of Sociology and Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. This collaboration was supported by The Divided City Initiative. You can learn more about The Divided City and the course specified above here.

Initially, our collective project for SOC 4930 was always going to come out of a partnership with ArchCity Defenders (learn more about them here, a nonprofit civil rights law firm located here in St. Louis that seeks to fight for and represent the poor and homeless in court. The nature of the project changed as we progressed through the semester; while our focus was initially on assisting ACD through the creation of some sort of digital map that could help them plot the cases they've handled/are handling, we eventually switched to focus on a specific player within the criminal justice system that ACD had run into before with some of their clients. This player, called EMASS (Eastern Missouri Alternative Sentencing Services), is a private company that provides pre-trial and post-trial probation services to courts in St. Louis. For the last month and a half of this class, we conducted interviews with clients/contacts referred to us by ACD, compiled field notes, visited EMASS locations in the St. Louis area. All of this was part of our exploration of EMASS, a seemingly mysterious entity that was/is keeping poor people of color trapped within the criminal justice system under the guise of being a company that offers its clients a better future than going to jail.

For my part of the project, I sought to do the following:

1. Digitize the history of EMASS
2. Situate EMASS within the broader history of electronic monitoring

To do this, I created a website you can visit here that features two timelines; one that catalogs events related to the history of EMASS (1991-2019) and another that documents events related to electronic monitoring (1969-2019). For some of the events, a clickable button labeled 'Explore' allows you to explore the content presented in the event bubble more; either through an outside resource (think a news article or an expanded text bubble). Note that the website currently has a menu bar at the top; this menu bar indicates possible future directions for this website. Since I was only responsible for a portion of our class project, the possibility of having all of my classmates' work also displayed in a digital format (i.e. on a website) is a direction that is feasible and appealing, in my opinion. Having multiple pages on the menu bar would allow us to move back and forth between different components of the project.

Want to contact me to learn more about this project? You can email me at [email protected] or [email protected]. Furthermore, you can check out my website at jeremyu.me if you want to take a quick look at some writing I've done in the past.

I would like to thank David Cunningham, Professor Caitlyn Collins, and Professor Patty Heyda for their guidance, knowledge, and leadership throughout my time taking SOC 4930. While us students needed to take ownership of this course, David, Caitlyn, and Patty all helped us through figuring out what our individual projects would look like and provided some structure for us to work within. Thank you also to my fellow classmates who worked with me and presented so many awesome ideas in and out of class. I found myself listening to all of you so much during class and I realized how much I have to learn about how power and inequality manifests here in St. Louis within the criminal justice system. While I was definitely frustrated with where our collective project was going at points in the semester, our final presentation, the practical research skills I got a glimpse of, and the feedback we got from those who came to listen to us present made it evident to me that our work, no matter how foundational/substantial, was and is worthwhile. I would like to thank Ethan Wiseman in particular for the work he's done to look through resources related to the history of electronic monitoring; the blurbs I've written for that timeline are directly from Ethan's part of our overall project (a report on the history of EM).