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Automating inequality : how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor

Author

Eubanks, Virginia, 1972- author.

Title

Automating inequality : how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor / Virginia Eubanks.

Format

Book

Edition

First edition.

Published

New York, NY : St. Martin's Press, 2018. ©2017

Description

260 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Portion of title

How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor

Notes

Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-251) and index.

Contents

• Introduction : red flags
• From poorhouse to database
• Automating eligibility in the heartland
• High-tech homelessness in the City of Angels
• The Allegheny algorithm
• The digital poorhouse
• Conclusion : dismantling the digital poorhouse
• Acknowledgments
• Sources and methods.

Summary

"The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years--because a new computer system interprets any mistake as "failure to cooperate." In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems--rather than humans--control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely."--Publisher's description. Eubanks investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. She shows how automated systems, rather than humans, control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. -- adapted from jacket.

Subject headings

Poor--Services for--United States--Data processing. Poverty--United States. Public welfare--Law and legislation--United States. Internet--Social aspects--United States. Computers--Social aspects--United States. Poor Services for United States Data processing. Poverty United States.

ISBN

9781250074317 (hardcover) 1250074312 (hardcover) 9781466885967 (electronic book) 1466885963 9781466885967