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

The majority of people in the US will encounter poverty at some point in their lives, needing food stamps, welfare, or some other public assistance. This chapter will “give a bird’s-eye view of how these tools work together to create a shadow institution for regulating the poor” (175).

Eubanks’s Indiana case study shows that automated public assistance is steering the poor away from assistance. The Daniels administration’s hostility to the poor was indiscriminate: “The automation’s effects touched six-year-old girls, nuns, and grandmothers hospitalized for heart failure” (179). The Indiana system perpetuates “a moral narrative that criminalizes most of the poor while providing life-saving resources to a lucky handful” (180).

The Los Angeles case study demonstrates that automated systems create a surveillance state around poverty by indiscriminately collecting, storing, and sharing data. For instance, information about the unhoused is kept for seven years, “and the Los Angeles Police Department can access it without a warrant. This is a recipe for law enforcement fishing expeditions” (180). This porous border between policing and assisting those without a home criminalizes poverty.

Finally, the Allegheny County case study illustrates that automation in governance makes the poor into second class citizens living in a totalitarian state with few rights: “The professional middle class would never tolerate the AFST evaluating their parenting.