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

The Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF) in Pennsylvania uses a judgment protocol called the Key Information and Demographics System (KIDS) to process social services requests. The aim of the KIDS system is to identify which indicators for kids in vulnerable situations are connected to child abuse. However, “Many struggles common among poor families are officially defined as child maltreatment, including not having enough food, having inadequate or unsafe housing, lacking medical care, or leaving a child alone while you work” (130).

In the late 1990s, when Marc Cherna took over CYF, “Seventy percent of children in the foster care system were Black, though African Americans made up only 11 percent of the population of Allegheny County” (134). There was huge racial bias inherent in the system. Cherna’s first priority was a comprehensive data warehouse, meant to “increase agency communication and accountability, provide wraparound services for clients, and cut costs” (135). Again, as with Governor Daniels in Indiana, the aim was to funnel public money to private business: In 2012, the state offered a million-dollar contract to build an automated triage data system. The winning proposal by New Zealand economist Rhema Vaithianathan was “a predictive model using 132 variables” which gave results with only “fair, approaching good” accuracy (137).