In the summer of 2020, Lee joined people across the US in the streets to protest the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Like thousands of others, Lee was arrested and told he would need to pay a money bond to get home to his family. Even if Lee had the money to pay bond, he was going to be placed on house arrest with electronic monitoring. The court was making Lee pay $20,000 to be transferred from one form of jail to another.

Prior to his arrest, Lee was living at home with his nine year old son and wife who was pregnant with their second child. When Lee wasn’t at home taking care of his son or running errands for his wife, he was working at McDonald’s and focused on starting his own photography business. Taking pictures was a longtime passion of Lee’s and he was taking the steps to turn that skill into a career, but all of that was put on hold by his incarceration. 

Due to legal complications, Lee wasn’t eligible to have his bond paid until six months after his arrest, at which time the Chicago Community Bond Fund helped get him released from Cook County Jail. Lee would ultimately spend a year and a half incarcerated in his home on electronic monitoring while awaiting trial.

While on house arrest, Lee had to regularly submit paperwork to ensure that he could get movement to go to school. Sometimes he would be left anxiously waiting for more than a week to find out whether his movement had been approved or not. Lee’s movement for school was terminated because he wasn’t able to get to school for two days. The Sheriff’s Office told him that since he didn’t make it to school those two days, they were denying future movement requests. 

Ultimately these complications forced him to drop out of school. He was able to get a job, but the ordeal with the paperwork prevented him from attending orientation. While on electronic monitoring, Lee’s older brother was killed. The Sheriff’s Office forced him to file paperwork and jump through other administrative hoops to be able to coordinate getting movement to attend his brother’s funeral.

While Lee was on electronic monitoring, the essential movement provisions of the Pretrial Fairness Act went into effect. The law is meant to ensure that people on electronic monitoring are given two days of movement each week to complete essential tasks like grocery shopping. Like many other people on electronic monitoring, Lee was denied that movement because he was going to school. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office has been systematically denying people essential movement if they have other forms of approved movement, even if that time doesn’t allow them to do the things guaranteed by the law like grocery shopping, doctor’s visits, or going to a laundromat.  

Lee’s children regularly asked him why he couldn’t go out with them; they didn’t understand why their father had to stay home when they’d go out. Electronic monitoring forced his wife to be responsible for everything, and it really hurt Lee that he wasn’t able to help her with going to the store and other household responsibilities. “The impact on my wife was the hardest part: I saw everything she was taking on for us and to see how it weighed on her.”

“If I would have had those two days of essential movement, I would have been able to do things that I couldn’t do on the days I had court ordered movement for school. If I could have gotten those two days I would have been able to go do some things with kids, go to church, or even promote my business.” said Lee. 

Even though Lee’s case has ended, he is still feeling the impacts of his incarceration. His time in jail and on electronic monitoring caused him to lose his job, miss out on school, and lose his connection to church and the community. Lee is currently working at Amazon and getting his photography business off the ground.

“Our system needs to be looked at with a magnifying glass. Even if someone is accused of a crime, they’re still human. Going through what electronic monitoring put me through, I don’t feel like that’s a normal way for any human to have to live their life. People need to be empathetic and put themselves in someone else’s shoes.”