Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age — A Book Review
There is no shortage of stories in the news these days about the dangers of technology and data in policing and the justice system. ProPublica recently reported that traffic cameras in Chicago disproportionately ticket Black and Latino drivers. At the end of 2021 The Guardian published coverage of the Los Angeles Police Department’s failed predictive policing program and its problematic replacement program that continues to target Black and brown communities. Vice reported last year that the Massachusetts Department of Corrections said it was exploring the use of devices that would monitor incarcerated persons’ vital signs to prevent suicides, putting their biometric data at risk.
The history of computerization and the growth of data infrastructure that underlie these stories come into focus in Brian Jefferson’s Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. By detailing the progression of digital computing technology in the criminal justice system throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with a particular emphasis on Chicago and New York City, Jefferson makes several core arguments.
The first of these arguments is that the use of digital technology has helped extend the War on Crime and Drugs that began with Lyndon Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), formed in the wake of the civil rights movement, urban riots, and the passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The LEAA was eager to take advantage of advances in technology to implement an array of systems such as police dispatching, fingerprinting, and correctional supervision. Jefferson traces this extension of the War on Crime through subsequent eras and presidential administrations, providing as examples increased surveillance and data growth spurred by the War on Terror and the Great Recession and the militarization of police departments under President Ronald Reagan that gave rise to GPS tracking of individuals in the community.
Jefferson explains that just as much as public officials and law enforcement agencies, information technology corporations have been the drivers of digitization in criminal justice. You will find familiar names of tech giants such as IBM and Oracle Corporation throughout the pages of Digitize and Punish. But even smaller more specialized companies such as those producing prison management and geographic information software got a piece of the action too. Describing the role of information capitalists, Jefferson writes,
“[Impoverished sectors of U.S. cities] find themselves increasingly immersed in networked infrastructures made up of audio sensors, datacenters, drones, electronic ankle monitors, geographic information systems, mobile digital terminals, server rooms, and smart surveillance cameras. They are constantly assessed through actuarial risk instruments, appraised through predictive analytics, digitally mapped and modeled, and monitored by smart cameras. And so long as the profit of technology corporations drives the proliferation of such technologies, criminalized populations present lucrative opportunities for IT capitalization.” (p. 4)
Other themes explored in the book include the realities of the rise of smart city infrastructure and how publicly accessible networks invite a continuation of punishment beyond the prison gates. Of this phenomenon Jefferson explains, “[W]eb technology allows the police to mobilize the public as sentinels for surveillance and the courts to highlight those whom they convict to employers, landlords, schools, and the public at large. The mergence of the web and mass criminalization has invoked the unsettling image of a wireless apparatus that can monitor and sanction former offenders as they move from point to point across various institutional landscapes.” (p. 131)
Finally, Digitize and Punish tracks the history of automated police apparatus and emphasizes the inherent dangers of favoring systems that purport to be based on scientific objectivity but that ignore the conditions in which populations are criminalized. Predictive policing is a good example of how this plays out. One function of many predictive policing systems is to probe offender and violent crime victim datasets and use algorithms to produce “heat lists” for targeted surveillance. Jefferson criticizes the practice, writing, “Predictive policing’s algorithms are products of the radically empiricist ideologies of corporate-bureaucratic intellectuals and computer scientists content to describe facts (e.g., arrest rates) without understanding their conditions of possibility (e.g., the War on Crime). From this perspective, social relations do not exist, only mathematical relations.” (p. 123)
Digitize and Punish concludes with an argument that digitized criminalization has happened largely outside the public’s awareness and that it needs to be part of the public debate over policy, specifically in discussions about abolition. Jefferson highlights recent efforts by organizers to use criminal justice datasets and surveillance infrastructure to increase police accountability and to pressure jurisdictions to destroy data such as gang databases.
We highly recommend this book to readers looking for a comprehensive historical background on computerization in the criminal justice system and digitized discrimination. It would make a great companion to The Rise of Big Data Policing by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson. Both books are available for check out by contacting us at library.requests@courts.wa.gov or 360–357–2136. (SC)
