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Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age by Brian Jefferson (review)

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.2023.a911040

1097-3729

Jason Ludwig,

History of Science and Medicine

Reviewed by: Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age by Brian Jefferson Jason Ludwig (bio) Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age By Brian Jefferson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pp. 265. A burgeoning literature has drawn attention to how racial discrimination shapes and is shaped by calculative and computational technologies, most notably in works by Ruha Benjamin, Charlton McIlwain, and Benjamin Higgins. Brian Jefferson's Digitize and Punish makes an important contribution to this growing field by examining the intersection of race and computing in an understudied historical case: the development and growth of computerization in the U.S. criminal justice system beginning in the 1960s. In doing so, Jefferson problematizes theorizations of digitized social control that claim that information technologies upend modernity's social categories and disciplinary strategies, drawing attention instead to the ways that the carceral state's digital technologies synthesize long-standing forms of racialized exclusion and enclosure. His arguments highlight how computing has transformed "geographies of carceral power" in American cities while also creating a profitable industry for information technology (IT) companies (p. 3). The book is divided into five chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion). The first chapter, "Computation and Criminalization," examines the earliest efforts to computerize the criminal justice system, and Jefferson's argument that law enforcement's enthusiasm for systems analysis in the 1960s enabled IT companies like IBM, Advanced Data Systems, and Bendix Corporation to turn data processing for the carceral state into a lucrative business will be of particular interest to historians of technology. Chapter 2, "Dreams of Digital Carceral Power," situates these developments within the upheavals affecting American cities in the late twentieth century, including deindustrialization, the slashing of municipal budgets, and the ongoing war on drugs and crime. Jefferson cogently argues that the creep of IT into prisons, the court system, and the parole and probation apparatus during [End Page 1356] this period produced "a simultaneous centralization and decentralization of carceral space courtesy of digital computing networks" (p. 70). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on case studies of New York and Chicago, two cities at the forefront of digitized policing. "A Fully Automated Police Apparatus" looks at how systems like CompStat (a computer program used to compile and compare crime statistics in order to extrapolate spatial patterns) have been used to identify and police marginalized people and places and also to reengineer police departments themselves in accordance with postwar management theories. "Punishment in the Network Form" catalogs the different systems with which law enforcement organizations have sought to enroll the public into its data pipelines, a pernicious kind of crowdsourcing Jefferson calls "human dronification" (p. 155). "How to Program a Carceral City" turns to the real-time crime data centers that oversee the network of smart surveillance devices that are increasingly a ubiquitous feature of urban infrastructure. Jefferson peppers the book with references to popular works like the cyberpunk novels of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, Gen Urobuchi's manga Psycho-Pass, and the science fiction anthology television series Black Mirror, pointing out that their dystopic imaginings seem increasingly less fictional next to the forms of police power currently being instantiated. Despite the bleak, totalitarian futures depicted in these works, the book concludes on a surprisingly hopeful note, pointing to activist movements that have organized against the digitized carceral state, oftentimes by exposing criminal justice data systems as arbitrary and error ridden. Jefferson uses stories of successful data activism to argue for the necessity of "a truly political digital theory" that probes "how the public might seize the means of digital communication and use them towards abolitionist ends" (p. 193). The great strength of this book is its attention to the ways that digital technologies inundate urban spaces with police power and disproportionately target people of color. This emphasis on the spatial aspects of digitized social control is perhaps unsurprising given the book's engagement with the critical geography of Ruth Wilson Gilmore. While the conceptual framework of "information capital" could have been more strongly developed—particularly in order to distinguish it from similar formulations like Shoshana Zuboff's "surveillance capitalism"—reading through this account of the meshing of corporate, carceral, and...