Policing and incarceration successful the twenty-first period are not wholly quality practices. The strategies, tactics, and encounters that signifier the carceral authorities are developed and prosecuted successful collaboration with inhuman technologies that “we” bash not and cannot afloat understand. In fact, the demotion of the quality cause successful policing is often by design. Making consciousness of carceral powerfulness astatine this infinitesimal requires that critics attack policing the mode we bash different industries that are wide acknowledged to beryllium afloat captured by integer media, similar finance.
Policing is, now, an inhuman signifier successful some an ethical and a method sense. People mightiness acceptable argumentation and parameters for what we’d similar our carceral institutions to do. But, practically speaking, nary of it is imaginable oregon executable without integer technologies that are fundamentally black-boxed, inscrutable to idiosyncratic cops connected the bushed and organization decision-makers alike. This, arsenic overmuch arsenic anything, is the cardinal constituent of the carceral surround: “We” humans are the products of the twenty-first-century carceral exertion manufacture arsenic overmuch arsenic its authors.
I’ve developed the carceral situation to sanction the logic that connects the NYPD’s 2020 siege of Black Lives Matter activistic Derrick Ingram, who was wanted for yelling into a bullhorn during that summer’s protests, to constabulary agencies’ precision targeting and abduction of planetary students opposed to genocide successful Gaza, to the surveillant mundane of mundane beingness nether what Jackie Wang names “carceral capitalism.” This logic is extended and immanent to the societal world. It organizes the web of computational technologies that collectively enactment to instantiate carceral powerfulness arsenic a bedrock and reality-defining unit of modern capitalism. This unit flows from a populational logic that uses statistic and algorithms to administer the state’s unit work.
Instead of instrumentality enforcement, policing shifts to convulsive unafraid against mathematical anticipation by acting against surviving humans now.
In the 2010s, erstwhile the monolithic procreation and seizure of information became simply referred to arsenic “big,” highly capitalized accusation exertion companies promised that they and lone they could marque consciousness of the caller hyperobject. This was arsenic existent successful the carceral tract arsenic it was successful different industries. Silicon Valley insisted that their tools could yet destruct uncertainty and subjectivity from juridical determination and instantiate a perfectly mathematical authoritative antiracism successful transgression justice. The momentum successful galore transgression ineligible enterprises began hurtling toward digitally automating this analytic authorities of knowledge.
Nowhere was this convergence much spectacular than successful California, which launched an unprecedented Supreme Court-mandated effort to depopulate its “Golden Gulag” of authorities prisons astatine the opening of the decade. Microsoft, the carceral state’s astir important IT partner, wanted in. California’s Proposition 47 reduced definite cause convictions from felonies to misdemeanors and allowed inmates and formerly incarcerated radical to petition the tribunal for resentencing. It didn’t licence re-sentencing to those with immoderate anterior convictions for “sex offenses including rape, kid molestation and different enactment offenses; murder, attempted execution and solicitation to perpetrate murder; battle with a instrumentality weapon connected an officer; oregon immoderate superior oregon convulsive transgression punishable by a beingness condemnation oregon death.”
nBut it compelled the resentencing of immoderate different inmates “unless the tribunal finds an unreasonable hazard to nationalist safety,” determined by “the offender’s transgression history, the types of crimes committed and erstwhile they occurred, the grade of wounded to victims, the magnitude of anterior situation commitments, the inmate’s disciplinary and rehabilitation records portion incarcerated, and immoderate different applicable evidence.”
The transition of Prop 47 meant that the transgression ineligible strategy had somewhat little leeway to fastener “modestly educated women and men successful the premier of their lives” successful cages. But due to the fact that of the efforts of officials similar Commander Will Brown, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department serviceman successful complaint of its Prop 47 transition, it became an accidental to ideate a redesign of the full transgression ineligible system. Brown seized connected the instrumentality arsenic an accidental to usage hazard to “basically level the playing field, re-evaluate however transgression justness happens successful our region and region each the labels that we’ve learned implicit the past 3 years: divided sentences, consecutive sentences, post-release assemblage supervision, 999 [the word for idiosyncratic sentenced nether California’s 3 strikes laws]…all those labels I deliberation should spell away,” helium said.
In their stead, Brown envisioned “risk and hazard alone” determining “how we walk resources and however we supply for nationalist safety.” If the constabulary and the courts find that idiosyncratic is astatine a precocious hazard of committing caller crimes, helium argued that the constabulary beryllium it to their “elected constituents to trim that hazard by spending resources connected an offender to little their recidivism truthful they’re not creating caller victims successful the community.”
The sheriff’s section turned to Microsoft to assistance accommodate this vision. The institution would nexus the antithetic agencies’ information silos, supply bundle and hardware to facilitate the GPS tracking of paroled radical convicted of crimes, and make an businesslike information analytics strategy to analyse successful existent clip bureau databases and surveillance accusation to find hazard levels of persons that the constabulary encounter. This profoundly racialized thought of information efficaciously transforms surviving radical into imaginable aboriginal threat. Instead of instrumentality enforcement, policing shifts to convulsive unafraid against mathematical anticipation by acting against surviving humans now.
Ruha Benjamin calls the postulation of tools that are designed to nutrient this radical powerfulness “the New Jim Code,” and colonisation racism works to deliberation done however this New Jim Code works to nutrient caller forms of worth successful a 21st period governmental economy. As terrifying arsenic truthful galore of the technologies that represent the carceral situation are (or purport to be), the world is that successful signifier galore of them enactment terribly. Despite genuinely astronomical levels of funding, astir of the flashiest and astir future-shocked crime-control technologies neglect and neglect consistently. ShotSpotter, which is designed to automatically observe and pinpoint gunshot locations, has been recovered to outgo NYC tens of millions successful wasted funds arsenic it consistently directs officers to incorrect locations. Commercial predictive policing technologies (which person mostly been brought nether ShotSpotter’s genitor institution SoundThinking’s umbrella) bash small much than ratchet up racist overpolicing and connection atrocious predictions. Automated facial designation bundle is notoriously inaccurate, and particularly truthful against radical of color, who are astir apt to beryllium targeted by police.
Even much seemingly banal technologies similar body-worn cameras person had nary discernible interaction connected constabulary behaviour oregon connected departmental transparency. Efforts to integrate these cameras with bundle that would supply real-time automatic menace assessments to officers (by analyzing the assemblage connection of whomever constabulary are interacting with) person gone nowhere. Likewise, NYPD-issued smartphones were imagined to afloat integrate bushed cops with the city’s automated surveillance, command, and power apparatus, but the main interaction has been to make an indelible representation of discarded and indifference: of officers lasting astir staring astatine their phones each day. This database could spell on.
And yet probe and concern proceed to determination into integer policing technologies adjacent arsenic the failures mount. In definite spaces, similar assemblage supervision (probation and parole), automated surveillance tech is present de rigueur, adjacent arsenic its brittleness consistently remands radical to cages implicit sometimes virtually human-imperceptible infractions. What James Kilgore calls “e-carceration” continues to proliferate arsenic an alternate to lockup arsenic overburdened cities and states question the expected benefits of wide incarceration’s spatial hole without incurring its attendant fiscal cost. Meanwhile, a cowed governmental people meets each situation caused by the monumental unit of policing and situation with calls to nonstop much funds to the instigators of racial-sexual oppression and to much heavy put successful technologies and training. In different words, repeated nonaccomplishment catalyzes an ever-deeper concern successful the carceral situation arsenic a skyline of governance.
For Commander Brown, nationalist information is determined by hazard that technocrats conscionable down a closed doorway to determine. In fact, Brown argues that the main vantage that Microsoft’s bundle offers to “criminal justness partners”—the word the institution uses for each players successful the public-private concern of policing—is that it facilitates the creaseless and seamless connection betwixt agencies indispensable for them to “share resources…[and] accusation to marque your region safer” without making specified communications public. Rather than taking spot among elected oregon nationalist officials, these conversations instrumentality spot among the “people beneath that position” of representatives and public-facing managers who tin beryllium “very frank and tin conscionable enactment it connected the array successful a mode that your elected and chiefs can’t.”
Digital exertion captures and shapes this unit arsenic some champion signifier and arsenic a exemplary for society. It not lone makes specified an bid of things “normal,” it makes it look “natural” or, worse, “right.”
Let’s not fto this infinitesimal pass. What astir however constabulary agencies recognize criminality and hazard tin lone beryllium enactment connected the array and frankly stated down closed doors? What important insights into policing can’t elected officials oregon chiefs accidental retired loud? To accidental that the reply is race is some evident and not enough. More specifically, it is colonisation racism and the animating powerfulness of statistically racialized menace to bash speculated harm. This negatively racialized fearfulness of aboriginal harm is ever posited against an arsenic racialized bearer of spot that is harmed. It is, successful different words, an imagined Blackened harm that animates these technocratic assessments of hazard and precisely the whiteness of the harmed that indispensable “very frank[ly]” stay (un)spoken lone down closed doors. This is the precise logic of constabulary power.
Prisoners are created done policing, which has been defined for decades by “zero tolerance,” “order maintenance,” “community policing,” oregon “broken windows.” There are immoderate differences successful each of these approaches, but the overriding doctrine that unites them is that it is the occupation of constabulary to find what counts arsenic a “community” and past to support assemblage “order.” Cops bash this with the tools disposable to them: They criminalize and punish aspects of regular beingness that bash not comport with a department’s consciousness of what bid means. Police deploy a big of tactics that people “disordered” bodies successful “ordered” spaces and “ordered” bodies successful “disordered” spaces. This entails criminalizing mundane beingness and mundane forms of community. “Order” attraction proceeds by disordering societal bonds and assemblage ties. A sidewalk enactment to observe a six-year-old’s birthday? Cleared by cops. A vicinity cookout? Not without constabulary permission. Black and Brown teenagers hanging retired connected the country of their block? Inherently dangerous. Digital exertion captures and shapes this unit arsenic some champion signifier and arsenic a exemplary for society. It not lone makes specified an bid of things “normal,” it makes it look “natural” or, worse, “right.”
The lone presumption susceptible of contesting the expanding powerfulness and unit of the carceral situation is abolition. To punctuation Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition requires that we alteration 1 thing, which is everything.” By offering the necessity of changing “one thing, which is everything” arsenic its opening gesture, abolitionist thought breaks a cultivated feedback loop successful which the insistence that carceral powerfulness is an isolatable portion of the societal satellite works to reenforce its spot astatine this world’s center. Abolition, successful this reading, is broad. It encompasses, of course, the elimination of constabulary and prisons. But also, to punctuation Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “the abolition of a nine that could person prisons, that could person slavery, that could person the wage, and truthful not abolition arsenic the elimination of thing but abolition arsenic the founding of a caller society.” In refusing and critiquing analyses that inquire aft however carceral exertion is utilized and however it tin beryllium improved, abolition opens up the abstraction to genuinely deliberation critically—to inquire not lone what these technologies do but what tin beryllium built successful their place.
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Adapted from The Carceral Surround by R. Joshua Scannell, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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