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<div class="container font-size5 content-width3"><font size="-2"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-reforms-race-technology.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fmichelle-alexander&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-reforms-race-technology.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fmichelle-alexander&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection</a></font><br>
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<b><font size="+2">Recent criminal justice reforms contain the
seeds of a frightening system of “e-carceration.”</font></b><time
datetime="2018-11-08"><br>
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Nov. 8, 2018 - </time><time datetime="2018-11-08">By <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/michelle-alexander"
class="css-luz7vr e1x1pwtg0"><span class="css-1baulvz"
itemprop="name">Michelle Alexander</span></a></time>
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<p>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 “<a
href="https://www.nelp.org/publication/ban-the-box-fair-chance-hiring-state-and-local-guide/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">ban the box</a>” initiatives
aimed at eliminating barriers to employment for
formerly incarcerated people. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Bail reform is a case in point. Thanks in part to
new laws and policies — as well as actions like
the <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/rikers-island-inmate-population.html?module=inline"
title="">mass bailout</a> 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; <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/nyregion/new-jersey-bail-system.html?module=inline"
title="">last year</a><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/nyregion/new-jersey-bail-system.html?module=inline"
title="">,</a> New Jersey virtually eliminated
the use of money bonds. </p>
<p>But what’s taking the place of cash bail may
prove even worse in the long run. In California, <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/29/california-abolishes-money-bail-with-a-landmark-law-but-some-reformers-think-it-creates-new-problems/?utm_term=.6330ca6adfbc"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">a presumption of detention</a>
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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Who benefits from this? Private corporations.
According to a <a
href="https://centerformediajustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/NoMoreShackles_ParoleReport_UPDATED.pdf"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">report released last month</a>
by <strong>t</strong>he 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.</p>
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<p>Who loses? Nearly everyone. A <a
href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/07/02/study-after-study-shows-ex-prisoners-would-be-better-off-without-intense-supervision/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">recent analysis</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/criminal-justice/Pretrial-Risk-Assessment-Full.pdf"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">shared statement of concerns</a>
regarding the use of pretrial risk assessment
instruments; numerous bail reform groups, such as
<a href="https://www.chicagobond.org/" title=""
rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Chicago
Community Bond Fund,</a> actively oppose the
expansion of e-carceration.</p>
<p>If our goal is <em>not</em> 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. <a
href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">warned</a> 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?</p>
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<p>Michelle Alexander became a New York Times
columnist in 2018. She is a civil rights lawyer
and advocate, legal scholar and author of “The New
Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness.” <span> </span></p>
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