Carceral tech

Carceral tech — or "carceral technologies" — is the abolitionist synthesis framing that names artificial intelligence, algorithmic surveillance, predictive policing, electronic monitoring, and prison-communication technology as components of a unified carceral apparatus that extends the carceral state beyond physical prison walls. Where adjacent framings address specific technologies — facial recognition, predictive policing, ankle monitors — the carceral tech framing works at the level of the apparatus as a whole, holding disparate anti-surveillance and anti-policing struggles together under a single analytical frame. Its defining move is the rejection of the reform-oriented "bias" analysis: where the bias frame asks whether a risk-assessment algorithm or face recognition deployment is racially unfair and seeks adjustment, the carceral tech framing argues that these systems do not fail when they produce racially disparate outcomes — they succeed, because the carceral state they serve was built on racial hierarchy and these technologies automate its logic. The scholarly term for the same apparatus is "carceral technoscience," introduced by Ruha Benjamin in her 2019 anthology Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press). The organizing infrastructure is the Carceral Tech Resistance Network (CTRN), a knowledge-sharing coalition co-founded in 2018 that grew to connect 76+ advocacy groups across the U.S. In the corpus, the framing is carried by MediaJustice's #NoDigitalPrisons campaign on electronic monitoring and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's decade-long campaign against data-driven policing, with adjacent framings msg-automating-banishment and msg-machine-bias naming specific nodes of the apparatus the synthesis frame holds together.

The abolitionist argument

The carceral tech framing's central claim, as Sarah T. Hamid of CTRN articulated in a 2020 Logic Magazine interview, is that "technological innovation, and the reformism that animates it, is a carceral tactic." The claim reframes the dominant civil-liberties and technology-ethics position on AI in policing. The dominant position — call it the bias frame — accepts that some AI deployment in policing and criminal justice is appropriate and asks whether the specific deployment is racially biased in its outputs; finds that it typically is; and proposes auditing, debiasing, transparency, or oversight as the remedies. The abolitionist frame rejects the starting premise: a risk-assessment tool like COMPAS or a predictive policing algorithm is not an object that can be made neutral by adjusting its weights. The records on which it trains — arrest histories, conviction records — are the product of decades of racially discriminatory policing and prosecution; adjusting the model's outputs without changing the records it learns from changes the appearance of the result without changing its substance. More fundamentally, the framing argues that the function of these systems is not crime prediction or risk reduction but carceral control: the direction of police attention, the justification for incarceration, the extension of surveillance into communities that are already over-policed. "Fair" predictive policing would still be predictive policing; "unbiased" COMPAS scores would still feed a sentencing system the framing holds should not exist.

Ruha Benjamin's anthology grounds this argument academically: the book's contributors examine how carceral technologies are deployed "to classify and coerce specific populations," and Benjamin's introduction calls for an abolitionist movement that extends beyond the formal bounds of the prison to seek "an end to carcerality in all its forms," recognizing that such an approach requires an expansive understanding of the "carceral" that attends to the institutional and imaginative underpinnings of oppressive systems. The implication for AI and algorithmic systems is that the question is not whether a specific system has been debiased but whether the system serves carceral purposes at all — and if it does, whether the appropriate response is improvement or abolition.

What the framing covers

The carceral tech framing holds several distinct technology classes under a single analytical roof:

Predictive policing — algorithmic systems (PredPol, ShotSpotter, Operation LASER, Palantir-supplied data analytics) directing police attention to people and locations algorithmically designated as high-risk. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's decade-long campaign against LAPD's predictive policing stack — culminating in their Automating Banishment framing, which named data-driven policing as an apparatus of land dispossession rather than crime prediction — is the in-corpus primary case for this branch of the apparatus.

Algorithmic risk assessment — tools like COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) used at bail, sentencing, and parole decisions to produce a recidivism-risk score. ProPublica's 2016 Machine Bias investigation documented that COMPAS flagged Black defendants as high-risk at nearly twice the rate of White defendants — the empirical record the reform frame cites for debiasing and the abolitionist carceral tech frame cites for abolition.

Face recognition in policing — deployments by police departments to identify subjects from surveillance footage and databases. The Algorithmic Justice League's audit work on commercial face recognition systems, establishing their systematically higher error rates on darker-skinned women, supplies the technical evidentiary base both for the bias-frame accuracy campaign and for the abolitionist argument that face recognition in policing is structurally incompatible with equal protection regardless of accuracy improvement.

Electronic monitoring / e-carceration — ankle monitors, GPS phone apps, voice-recognition check-in systems, and biometric wearables deployed as nominal alternatives to incarceration. MediaJustice's Challenging E-Carceration project has produced the #NoDigitalPrisons research corpus documenting that electronic monitoring doubled in use over the decade ending in 2018 while incarceration declined — framing the trend as carceral expansion via technological displacement rather than decarceration. The project's "No More Shackles" reports argue that electronic monitors and phone-tracking apps impose severe movement restrictions (limiting work, education, family contact), extract high compliance costs from surveilled families, and amount to incarceration in the community rather than an alternative to it.

Prison communication technology — the proprietary telecommunications and tablet systems deployed in prisons and jails, which surveil communication between incarcerated people and their families while charging rates that extract revenue from both. This branch of the apparatus sits at the framing's boundary with the telecommunications-justice field and enters the corpus through the electronic-monitoring and abolitionist carriage rather than through a standalone framing.

Organizing infrastructure

CTRN was built from two recognized needs: first, that carceral technologies are piloted locally and "travel" to other contexts — what is tested against a Skid Row population in Los Angeles appears in a different city under a different program name — creating a structural need for coordinated knowledge-sharing and mutual aid between locally-focused campaigns; second, that the abolitionist frame for evaluating these technologies requires active cultivation against the reform frame that dominates tech-industry and mainstream policy discourse. Co-founded in 2018 and formally constituted in March 2020, CTRN grew to 76+ advocacy groups across the U.S. West Coast, Midwest, and Southwest. Its composition — primarily femme, Black, immigrant, and POC organizers — reflects the communities most directly harmed by the technologies the network resists.

MediaJustice's Challenging E-Carceration project, launched 2018 and directed by James Kilgore as a MediaJustice Fellow, has carried the electronic-monitoring branch of the framing into state-level legislative campaigns — most visibly in California, Illinois, and the national space — producing the abolitionist legislative framing that electronic monitoring is not an alternative to incarceration but a form of it, and that its expansion during COVID-19 jail releases in 2020 represented a carceral displacement rather than a humanitarian response.

The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice and Research Action Design (RAD) codified the framing for funders in their Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures report, defining "carceral technologies" as "tools designed to capture, confine, control, punish, and exploit people" and mapping the organizing ecosystem — CTRN, MediaJustice, Stop LAPD Spying, and allied organizations — as the field requiring philanthropic investment.

2020 and broadening

The George Floyd uprisings of May–June 2020 gave the carceral tech framing its widest circulation. As "defund the police" became a mainstream political demand, the future of police technology — predictive policing systems, face recognition contracts, ShotSpotter acoustic surveillance — was pulled inside the abolition frame in legislative debate and media coverage. Several U.S. cities cancelled or paused predictive policing and face recognition contracts in 2020–2021; the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's research and the CTRN network were positioned to connect local campaigns when abolition demands peaked.

The framing's post-2020 propagation ran along two tracks. On the abolitionist organizing track, CTRN's network and MediaJustice's #NoDigitalPrisons visibility carried it through grassroots and digital-rights spaces. On the policy track, the ACLU, Brennan Center, and allied organizations began using "carceral technology" in legislative advocacy — notably in opposition to electronic monitoring expansion — which brought the term into legislative record and mainstream media coverage, extending its reach while often loosening the abolitionist frame it originated in.

Framing in the corpus

The carceral tech framing is the synthesis umbrella that several more specific in-corpus framings inhabit. Automating Banishment — the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's 2021 report naming data-driven policing as land dispossession — is the most fully developed single-case articulation: it places predictive policing not as failed crime prediction but as a functioning apparatus for clearing Black, brown, and unhoused people from land under real-estate pressure, occupying the same analytical register as the carceral tech synthesis with a specific Los Angeles topography. Machine Bias — ProPublica's 2016 COMPAS investigation — provides the empirical record both the reform and abolitionist frames cite from different directions: the reform frame for debiasing; the carceral tech frame as evidence that the bias is the function. No Tech For ICE covers an adjacent sector of the same apparatus (immigration enforcement) and shares the supply-chain argument connecting Silicon Valley contractors to state violence, differing from CTRN's community-defense organizing shape in its emphasis on tech-worker dissent. Ban Biometric Mass Surveillance occupies the intersection between the carceral tech framing and the European digital-rights movement's prohibition campaign, naming biometric identification as the specific technology class that should be prohibited outright.