Michelle Alexander writes for the New York Times:
In the midterms, Michigan became the first state in the
Midwest to legalize marijuana, Florida restored the vote to over 1.4 million
people with felony convictions, and Louisiana passed a constitutional
amendment requiring unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials. These are
the latest examples of the astonishing progress that has been made in the last
several years on a wide range of criminal justice issues. Since 2010, when I
published “The New Jim Crow” — which argued that a system of legal discrimination
and segregation had been born again in this country because of the war on drugs
and mass incarceration — there have been significant changes to drug policy,
sentencing and re-entry, including “ban the box” initiatives aimed at eliminating
barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated people.
This progress is unquestionably good news, but there are
warning signs blinking brightly. Many of the current reform efforts contain the
seeds of the next generation of racial and social control, a system of
“e-carceration” that may prove more dangerous and more difficult to challenge
than the one we hope to leave behind.
Bail reform is a case in point. Thanks in part to new laws
and policies — as well as actions like the mass bailout of inmates in New York City jails that’s
underway — the unconscionable practice of cash bail is finally coming to an
end. In August, California became the first state to decide to get
rid of its cash bail system; last year, New Jersey virtually eliminated the use of money bonds.
But what’s taking the place of cash bail may prove even
worse in the long run. In California, a presumption of detention will effectively
replace eligibility for immediate release when the new law takes effect in
October 2019. And increasingly, computer algorithms are helping to determine
who should be caged and who should be set “free.” Freedom — even when it’s
granted, it turns out — isn’t really free.
Under new policies in California, New Jersey, New York and
beyond, “risk assessment” algorithms recommend to judges whether a person who’s
been arrested should be released. These advanced mathematical models — or
“weapons of math destruction” as data scientist Cathy O’Neil calls them —
appear colorblind on the surface but they are based on factors that are not
only highly correlated with race and class, but are also significantly
influenced by pervasive bias in the criminal justice system.
As O’Neil explains, “It’s tempting to believe that computers
will be neutral and objective, but algorithms are nothing more than opinions
embedded in mathematics.”
Challenging these biased algorithms may be more difficult
than challenging discrimination by the police, prosecutors and judges. Many
algorithms are fiercely guarded corporate secrets. Those that are transparent —
you can actually read the code — lack a public audit so it’s impossible to know
how much more often they fail for people of color.
Even if you’re lucky enough to be set “free” from a
brick-and-mortar jail thanks to a computer algorithm, an expensive monitoring
device likely will be shackled to your ankle — a GPS tracking device provided
by a private company that may charge you around $300 per month, an involuntary
leasing fee. Your permitted zones of movement may make it difficult or
impossible to get or keep a job, attend school, care for your kids or visit
family members. You’re effectively sentenced to an open-air digital prison, one
that may not extend beyond your house, your block or your neighborhood. One
false step (or one malfunction of the GPS tracking device) will bring cops to
your front door, your workplace, or wherever they find you and snatch you right
back to jail.
Who benefits from this? Private corporations. According to
a report released last month by the Center for
Media Justice, four large corporations — including the GEO Group, one of
the largest private prison companies — have most of the private
contracts to provide electronic monitoring for people on parole in some 30
states, giving them a combined annual revenue of more than $200 million just
for e-monitoring.Companies that earned millions on contracts to run or
serve prisons have, in an era of prison restructuring, begun to shift
their business model to add electronic surveillance and monitoring of the same
population. Even if old-fashioned prisons fade away, the profit margins of
these companies will widen so long as growing numbers of people find themselves
subject to perpetual criminalization, surveillance, monitoring and control.
Who loses? Nearly everyone. A recent analysis by a Brookings Institution
fellow found that “efforts to reduce recidivism through intensive supervision
are not working.” Reducing the requirements and burdens of community
supervision, so that people can more easily hold jobs, care for children and
escape the stigma of criminality “would be a good first step toward breaking
the vicious incarceration cycle,” the report said.
Many reformers rightly point out that an ankle bracelet is
preferable to a prison cell. Yet I find it difficult to call this progress. As
I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to
slavery.
If you asked slaves if they would rather live with their
families and raise their own children, albeit subject to “whites only signs,”
legal discrimination and Jim Crow segregation, they’d almost certainly say:
I’ll take Jim Crow. By the same token, if you ask prisoners whether they’d
rather live with their families and raise their children, albeit with nearly
constant digital surveillance and monitoring, they’d almost certainly say: I’ll
take the electronic monitor. I would too. But hopefully we can now see
that Jim Crow was a less restrictive form of racial and social control, not a
real alternative to racial caste systems. Similarly, if the goal is to end
mass incarceration and mass criminalization, digital prisons are not an answer.
They’re just another way of posing the question.
Some insist that e-carceration is “a step in the right
direction.” But where are we going with this? A growing number of scholars and
activists predict that “e-gentrification” is where we’re headed as entire communities
become trapped in digital prisons that keep them locked out of neighborhoods
where jobs and opportunity can be found.
If that scenario sounds far-fetched, keep in mind that mass
incarceration itself was unimaginable just 40 years ago and that it was born
partly out of well-intentioned reforms — chief among them mandatory sentencing
laws that liberal proponents predicted would reduce racial disparities in
sentencing. While those laws may have looked good on paper, they were passed
within a political climate that was overwhelmingly hostile and punitive toward
poor people and people of color, resulting in a prison-building boom, an
increase in racial and class disparities in sentencing, and a quintupling of
the incarcerated population.
Fortunately, a growing number of advocates are organizing to
ensure that important reforms, such as ending cash bail, are not replaced with
systems that view poor people and people of color as little more than
commodities to be bought, sold, evaluated and managed for profit. In July, more
than 100 civil rights, faith, labor, legal and data science groups released
a shared statement of concerns regarding the
use of pretrial risk assessment instruments; numerous bail reform groups, such
as Chicago
Community Bond Fund, actively oppose the expansion of
e-carceration.
If our goal is not a better system of mass
criminalization, but instead the creation of safe, caring, thriving
communities, then we ought to be heavily investing in quality schools, job
creation, drug treatment and mental health care in the least advantaged
communities rather than pouring billions into their high-tech management and
control. Fifty years ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that “when machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,
the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable
of being conquered.” We failed to heed his warning back then. Will we make a
different choice today?
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