Technological Solutionism and Post Criminology PDF

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Comprehensive lecture notes, lecture delivered by Dr Paul McGuinness...

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Technological Solutionism and Post Criminology: Technological Solutionism: - Looking for solutions to problems through technological fixes. - Overriding faith in technology to solve our problems in society. o Treating social problems unsocially. o Not coming together to discuss why these problems exist and how we can create a society without these problems. o Technology to address a symptom rather than address the cause. - The good cop to neoliberalism’s bad cop. o Neoliberalism  western Europe, USA, societies that feel that the best solution to social problems is through the markets, if there is an issue the most effective way to address it is to allow companies to come up with capitalist solutions to it. Disciplining people, brings about austerity, being cost-effective and not wasting money. Making individuals responsible for their successes and failures in life. o UK conservative government has a neoliberalist core. - If there is no alternative, best we can do is apply digital plasters to the damage (Margaret Thatcher). o No alternative to capitalist realism. o Technological solutionism isn’t a solution to the systems problems, it smooths and covers the cause of the problems. - Solutionists deploy technology to avoid politics; appearing ‘post-ideological’ o Supporting and perpetuating capitalism realist way of life. o If we hold the belief that technology can save us from social problems  we don’t have healthy politics, we do not discuss issues. o Always a technical code inflected with ideology. Politically motivated. - Neoliberalism proactively shrinks public budgets, remove what the state does for people; solutionism reactively shrinks public imagination, convincing the public digital technologies can revolutionise everything but the central institution of modern life; the market. Stops you thinking that what the government is doing is bad. - Disruption  e.g. uber and Deliveroo, not disrupting the markets or the core ideological parts of society. Nothing revolutionary about these big tech companies. Diminishing the public need for public transport and public infrastructure. The infrastructure isn’t there so we need a technological solution for it e.g. an app. - Governments not governing and instead turning towards technocratic custodians of Silicon Valley for answers to once political questions; their problem-solving approaches overtake democratic governance. o Technological companies addressing the problems. - Structural problems are viewed as insurmountable. - Politics through apps; purporting to solve problems we cannot address collectively. o Useful lengths to understand neoliberalist existence. o Apps help us / motivate us / give us the tools to address problems in our lives that we cannot address collectively. o E.g. Obesity in USA, don’t have proper food regulations, instead you get apps that empower you to lose weight, fitbits etc, rather than creating a society

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that makes public health easy and normal because this would hurt the profits of certain companies. Privatise, market-based solutions fuction at the level of citizen not citizenry. o Targets individuals rather than the collective population. Past predicts the future because environmental vulnerabilities that precipitated the first instance have been unaddressed leading to subsequent instances. o Easy to predict the future in capitalist realism because it replicates the past because the structures that created the past are unchanged therefore we are bound to repeat. o Therefore, it becomes predictable.

The New Penology (Simon and Feely 1992):

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Identified a shift in criminal justice factors, moving away from a penal welfare system to a more market orientated system. The new penology has the logic of an actuary, an insurance business, treating criminal justice problems as an insurer might treat them. Not thinking about what they did post-crime, but what they will do pre-crime. Instead of treating problems to reduce crime, we assess a person’s risk and see how to manage it. Not reducing crime, controlling crime e.g. imprisonment rates increased. o Can’t do anything about crime to why try, instead manage the dangerous parts of society. Becomes a managerial system rather than a social good. A shift from what is the best / right thing to do, to what is the most cost effective way of treating this problem to reduce the cost to society. Rise of neoliberal economics. Rise of a risk obsessed society.

A Prehistory of The New Penology: - Burgess (1928) used prison records to develop risk factors for Illinois parole board. o Used for a long time. - Glueck and Glueck (1950) identified markers of persistent offending among cohort of male juvenile offenders. o Seminal piece of life course criminology. o Idea that we were starting to identify commonalities in juvenile offenders and following that longitudinally into the rest of their lives.

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Wolfgang et al (1972) study of arrest patterns among Philadelphia boys observed a small percentile accounted for nearly half of the cohort’s total crime. ‘Criminal Careers’ (Blumstein et al 1986). o The ability to identify risk factors of young people that would then predict their engagement in a life of criminality. o How to identify these people in the population and manage them. Uncritical reliance on the government’s own systems e.g. arrest / incarceration data, created a feedback loop, reinforcing the past rather than predicting the future. o Criminology relies on the state / government as the source of statistics. o Feedback Loop  companies talk about predicting future behaviours, what they’re really doing is tracing past patterns and admitting that post-structural issues haven’t change and these past patterns will repeat. This gives the impression of prediction. Preoccupation with risk has always been a part of the criminological imagination.

Further Cultural Context: - Law  Dominant insurance-influenced approach to liability for negligence in tort law. - Computer science  Rise of systems engineering and operations research as tools of governance. - Rise of law and economics. o Study of how to encourage behaviours, deterrence through sentencing tarrifs. - People were able to rely on computer systems more, treating law as a way to encourage and discourage certain behaviours. - Simon and Foucault discuss role of insurance as a mechanism for extending governance to populations through new technologies of power e.g. creation of health statistics to managed social conflicts via social benefits like worker’s compensation. o Insurance as a form of technology. o Benefits start to become quantified, means tested and risk assessed. o These measurements come into play as a way to control people, not as the most effective way to do business. o Disciplining ideology dispersing through society. o Certain organisations that have access to more data than most do.  The main data brokers in the world started off as insurance companies. - Tort law was already equipped to reduce crime’s harms and spread its losses. - Underclass conceived as needing a ‘waste management’ system. o Criminal class of people that don’t have a role to play in a neoliberal society. o Waste management system needed for this underclass. o We need data and systems engineering to better, more efficiently create a power structure. - Cultural context to how these criminological ideas take route and start to have salience for legal practice. New Penology: - Didn’t last long.

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Quantified risk orientated approach doesn’t seem to be characterised in the dominant law and order approach seen today. We’re not managing risk but we are punishing.

Actuarism’s Comeback? - The new penology’s declined with ‘governing through crime’ (Simon 2007). Political usefulness declined alongside the crime rate in the last 20 years; diminishment of terror attacks. o How politically useful crime was to emotionally manipulate people. o ‘tough on crime’ o Less interest in risk assessment over the years. - With bipartisan antipathy for mass incarceration and likes of Brown v Plata (2011) is actuarialism in line for a comeback? o No longer just opposed by more liberal parties, both democrats and republicans are expressing resistance to the inevitability to mass incarceration. o Brown v Plata  unconstitutional to hold people in these mega-jails that are common in USA. - Actuarism making a comeback? o Need to make better use of policing resources. o Need to think smarter and therefore use these risk assessment instruments to allocate resources and control people outside of prisons etc. o Are we now at a turning point technologically?, can we make good on new penology (e.g. risk assessment) premises using technology. - Advocates claim risk-assessment instruments mitigate rather than amplify, criminaljustice disparities along dimensions including race, age and gender and increased transparency of justice decisions will aid future reform efforts (Ferguson 2015). o The CJS as it is creates disparities, perhaps it isn’t right for reform as it is. o Technologies allow us to better understand decisions made than a person e.g. a judge can. - Feedback loop transparency. o How transparent is Palantir with how it goes about its business? Palantir: - Data company. - Become public after 17 years, you can buy shares in the company. - Palantir claim to predict crime before it happens and provide technology to better inform those predictive qualities. - Founded after 9/11 to protect American interests. - Palantir at the LAPD: o Using information system to make sense of society. o Important tool for investigations. Migration of Traditional Police Practices towards Big Data Surveillance:

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o (Brayne 2017) How traditional policing practices have changed through the years. Palantir has started to transform policing practices. Does it change policing into something that is no longer legitimate in the public, less of a public good now? Least significant change  police can still make a discretionary call as to how dangerous someone is. Explaining the relationships between data is starting to come from computer print outs than from detective work. Moving towards more of an influence on policing practices than the old methods. A move towards alert-based information systems, police responding to alerts that the software allows to happen. Move away from a moderate inclusion threshold to a low inclusion threshold. More and more people who are less and less involved in crime itself become part of the information gathering system. Biggest change  all of a sudden every bit of material of value captured by surveillance systems can all be compressed into a profile of behaviours. Powerful software that changes how policing works. Asks questions about how legitimate the police are.

Integrated Data Sources: - Public Safety Sources o NOPD  Calls for Service (CAD)  Electronic Police Reports (EPR)  Field information cards (FIC)  Case management system. o Parole and probation records for Orleans Parish and surrounding parishes. o Sheriffs office arrest and booking records. o Group and gang database. - Open Data Sources o Schools, parks, libraries.

o Liquor stores. o Map layers (police, fire and council districts, historic districts, city parks, statistical areas) o Streetlights. - Beneficial, creates a feedback loop. o E.g. geographical maps of murderers etc. Palantir Focuses Resources: - New Orleans using Palantir: Deploying limited resources where they will make the most impact. o Ceasefire hospital crisis intervention team  target community outreach to hotspots. o Department of public works  repair streetlight outages. o Fire department  increase presence around schools in violent areas. o Health department  identify schools with high-risk populations for prevention initiatives. o Innovation delivery team  analyse murder victim wound locations. o Law department  enforce alcohol beverage outlet (ABO) violations. o Mayors office  locate neighbourhood clean-up sites. o NOPD  social network analysis, identify gang involvement in murders and shootings etc. Scoring 2014 Murders: - Incidents as of 4/1/2014

Smart Policing to Urban War Machine (Sadowski 2020): - Smart policing becomes part of the urban war machine. - “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” - Sacrificing civil liberty and human life on the altar of security. - Foregoing democratic legitimacy for the sake of secrecy. - Subverting oversight by local politicians and the public. - Rapidly pacifying protests that even symbolically threaten state or capital’s authority. - Securitizing space and disenfranchising citizens in the name of urban revitalization. - Aspiring to possess omniscience and omnipotence over their domain. - Converts city into a battlespace, the public into subjects or adversaries, and law enforcement into an arms race for surveillance and control. - Freedom and liberty become problematised.

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Neoliberal insecurity, how much liberty we have to give up to feel secure. If all risks are managed and controlled, things like civil disobedience becomes almost impossible, unable to give voice to injustices. Law enforcement becomes about control rather than protection. o Managing us all as risks. o All subjects of the new penology.

Letter from the Chief Executive Officer: - Shows the technical code of Palantir. - The challenges that we face, and the crises that we have and will continue to confront, expose the systemic weaknesses of the institutions on which we depend. Our industrial infrastructure and manufacturing supply chains were conceived of and constructed in a different century. Government agencies have faltered in fulfilling their mandates and serving the public. Some institutions will struggle to survive. Others will collapse. o Technological solution here is not creating different ways of doing things but is supporting old infrastructures, not thinking about different ways of serving the public. - Our software is used to target terrorists and to keep soldiers safe. If we are going to ask someone to put themselves in harm’s way, we believe that we have a duty to give them what they need to do their job. - Our society has effectively outsourced the building of software that makes our world possible to a small group of engineers in an isolated corner of the country. The question is whether we also want to outsource the adjudication of some of the most consequential moral and philosophical questions of our time. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires. - We have chosen sides, and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient, and when it is not. Pitfalls of Problems Solved: - Pitfalls of solutionism, when some problems are solved using technology that don’t address structures that cause the problems, we are causing more problems down the line. - Conservation of inefficiency in Automated Law Enforcement (Hartzog et al. 2015) - How to challenge the law? Zero Tolerance on Civil Disobedience, Whistle Blowers - Criminalizing Risk may be vague, silent, contra the focusing spectacle of the arrest and trial: lost opportunities for norm clarification - What is a scientific approach to just desserts? Free Will? - Schneier celebrates "defection” as "an engine for innovation, an immunological challenge to ensure the health of the majority, a defence against the risk of monoculture, a reservoir of diversity, and a catalyst for social change." o Having a diverse democratic public debate at fundamental levels of how our lives are designed. #ownyourdata:

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“Data is in fact a new kind of capital on par with financial capital for creating new products and services. And it’s not just a metaphor; data fulfils the literal textbook definition of capital” (OracleANZ 2015) “Big Data, like Soylent Green, is made of people” (Karen Gregory 2014) Resist ‘technofeudalism’ through formal property, labor or human rights advocacy regulating production Seize the means of production?

Pre-Crime or Post-Criminology: - 'Have you ever read any criminological texts? They are staggering. And I say this out of astonishment, not aggressiveness, because I fail to comprehend how the discourse of criminology has been able to go on at this level' [characterized by a] 'garrulous discourse', 'endless repetitions'... 'One has the impression that it is of such utility, is needed so urgently and rendered so vital for the working of the system, that it does not even need to seek a theoretical justification for itself, or even simply a coherent framework. It is entirely utilitarian' (Foucault 1980). - Criminology is a post-crime discipline. o Reactionary. - Criminology is a state discipline, about supporting the state, better ways to punish etc. Uses statistics from the state as the core....