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

Resource Information

The work Automating inequality : how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Biddle Law Library - University of Pennsylvania Law School. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

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

Title remainder

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

Statement of responsibility

Virginia Eubanks

Title variation

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

Creator

• Eubanks, Virginia, 1972-

Author

• Eubanks, Virginia, 1972-

Subject

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

Language

eng

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 lies 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

Cataloging source

YDX

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

HC79.P6

LC item number

E89 2019

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography