COOL IT! The objective racism of carceral technofixes

ABSTRACT

Technofixes that promise to improve racism in the prison industrial complex (PIC) frequently perpetuate it instead. This article argues that carceral technofixes undermine their promises when they attempt to solve social problems by pacifying the people that these problems affect. It offers a reading of physicist Alvin Weinberg's writings on technofixes, which, he believed, could improve social problems better than people because they appeared objective. This appearance emerged through the process of scientific reduction, which simplifies social complexity to help designers identify symptoms of problems amenable to technological intervention. This article claims that scientific reduction orients technofixes to make systemic power in the PIC invisible and to silence radical calls for system reform. I explore these tendencies through two examples: (1) Weinberg's hypothesis that air conditioning could prevent Black uprisings in the 1960s and (2) the COMPAS recidivism algorithm at use in Florida today, which attempts to pacify critics of the PIC by framing the subjective assessments of judges as the source of racist sentencing disparities. The article also shows how COMPAS limited radical critiques of the PIC even after it reproduced racist sentencing disparities as it directed the conversation of algorithmic racism around questions of algorithmic fairness, transparency, and accountability.

KEYWORDS:

• Technofix
• racism
• history of technology
• carcerality
• algorithmic bias

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).