Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Eubanks describes visiting Kim and Kevin Stipes in Tipton, Indiana. Their daughter Sophie has cerebral palsy, among other conditions, which in total cost the family more than $6000 a month in medical expenses. After a mix-up, the local Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) cut of Sophie Stipes’s Medicaid benefits for inaction, even though the office failed to inform the Stipes of mandatory paperwork. Sophie’s case was only addressed after the Stipeses protested at the governor’s office and received TV coverage.

The Stipeses were emblematic of what happens when welfare is privatized. In 2006, Indiana Republican governor Mitch Daniels “instituted a welfare reform program that relied on multinational corporations to streamline benefits applications, privatize casework, and identify fraud” (45). Daniels’s actual agenda was funneling public taxpayer funds to private business: “By the time of the automation, the FSSA had halved its public workforce and was spending 92 percent of its budget buying services from outside vendors” (47).

After Indiana instituted an automated referral system made by IBM and ACS, the state’s welfare system fell apart: Private call center employees were not equipped with the proper training or emotional resiliency required of their new jobs, which meant applicants were stranded. Errors surged, as a “result of inflexible rules that interpreted any deviation from the newly rigid application process, no matter how inconsequential or inadvertent, as an active refusal to cooperate” (51).