beyond the criminal legal system.

carceral AI extends beyond the criminal legal system.

Policing, surveillance, incarceration, and captivity extend beyond formal carceral institutions like prisons, police departments, or the criminal legal system. AI and digital technologies allow for new ways for policing and incarceration to be brought out of prisons into homes, schools, hospitals, refugee camps, borders, streets, and neighborhoods. We highlight three ways that carceral technologies extend incarceration to illustrate our argument.

First, technologies are used to create de facto prisons, often to automate incarceration outside of formal prisons. For example, e-carceration technologies like ankle monitors and cameras are used to surveil and control people serving criminal sentences in their own homes, instead of incarcerating them in prisons and immigration detention facilities. Outside the criminal justice context, border control technologies like aerial drones – which are part of a patchwork of technologies that make up the so-called “smart border” – allow governments and NGOs to surveil and control the movement of individuals at the border and in refugee camps, turning those spaces into de facto prisons. Moreover, the deployment of carceral technologies at the US-Mexico border has increased the number of deaths in borderlands as migrants are forced to take more dangerous routes to evade detection.

Second, technologies reify policing and surveillance outside the formal policing or criminal legal systems, such as in care work. For example, algorithms in the child welfare or family policing system, such as the Allegheny Family Screening Tool in Pennsylvania, justify the investigation and separation of families. Furthermore, electronic visit verification or remote disability support technologies place caregivers and the people they care for under digital surveillance, restricting their autonomy.

Third, technologies facilitate new forms of cooperation between police and entities outside the formal carceral system. For example, hospitals, hotlines, and social media sites like Facebook and Instagram use technologies to predict if people are experiencing suicidality, which have been used to justify police involvement through so-called "wellness checks” or involuntary detention in psychiatric facilities. Police also increasingly use social media data to secure criminal charges and convictions, such as in gang prosecutions. Additionally, civilians actively engage in state surveillance by sharing mugshots, doorbell camera footage, and court records online in the pursuit of personal and communal safety. This widespread sharing and accessibility of information across private and public databases perpetuates the cycle of incarceration, impeding the reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals into society.