Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Washington University Law Review

Volume

103

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

Although the Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” this right is not enjoyed by all people equally. Supreme Court jurisprudence has curtailed the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of individuals under probation or parole supervision. In this line of cases, the Court concluded that the government’s interest in monitoring supervisees, reducing recidivism, and promoting public safety outweighed their reasonable expectation of privacy.

However, surveillance mechanisms like probation and parole extend the criminal legal system’s carceral gaze beyond the supervisees and peer into the bedrooms and digital lives of their families, roommates, and communities, or who this Article calls system-adjacent individuals. Probation and parole capture adjacent individuals in the carceral surveillance net subjecting their homes and electronic devices to scrutiny and punitive control despite having been neither charged nor convicted of a crime. Such surveillance infringes upon their constitutional privacy rights by allowing the government to conduct warrantless, non-consensual searches of adjacent individuals’ residences and devices opening an undertheorized loophole in the Fourth Amendment.

This Article exposes how courts routinely deprive adjacent individuals of their Fourth Amendment privacy rights when they reside or share an electronic device with a supervisee subject to a probation or parole search condition. It proposes reinvigorating adjacent individuals’ privacy protections by encouraging courts to incorporate previously overlooked factors in the constitutional balancing test. It further argues that, when properly applied, courts should routinely suppress evidence recovered during a residential or electronic probation or parole search, absent a warrant, when introduced against an adjacent individual in a criminal proceeding. Finally, in response to the privacy concerns arising from the advancement of surveillance technologies, it offers legislative and structural reforms that constrain probation and parole officers’ search authority.

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