Early in 2018 I got involved in the Women's Prison Association, a really great organization based in NYC as an emerging philanthropist - which is in so many words their junior board. We've been meeting monthly to organize events to raise funds to help women of NYC and their families who are touched in some way by the criminal "justice" system (come to our fundraising gala tomorrow (6/20) and/or donate pls!!)
There are many reasons why this organization means so much to me, especially as both a prison abolitionist and a technologist who is seeing code already being used to further oppress marginalized communities. It's very clear that people of color are by far the most harmed by mass incarceration, and it's a vicious white supremacist cycle that I see no end to unless we dismantle the systems - not digitize them.
Anyway, I can speak more to my feelings on this, but today I wanted to share a talk I gave to my fellow EPs a couple of months ago at one of our monthly meetings. I recently saw some of my peers in the tech industry sharing frightening articles about police "starting" to use artificial intelligence and I feel it is my duty to share this talk now because it's not something they're starting to do, they've *been* doing it. I encourage you to not only read the articles included, but look further into the authors' work, because their continued coverage and exposing of data is key to helping us combat these issues.
This was a 10-15 minute slide-driven talk to women with all different kinds of backgrounds - most of them not in tech, a few lawyers, and many working day to day on the efforts of helping the women of NYC stay out of prison and re-enter society. That's why this talk is NYC focused and not "for software engineers" - but it's very likely that your city/state is practicing the same digital oppression of one of the largest incarcerated populations in the world, and that my fellow software engineers can learn a lot from how the code we write can be harming people and destroying what justice *should* be in our society.
In closing, I want to ask my fellow engineers, who have been asking to see the slides of this talk, to think about this: it's very easy to work on cutting edge tools and make are with it, or work in R&D labs of big companies and think we're just making art and trying out cool stuff, but at the end of the day are we really just helping those companies prepare for big money government contracts?
There's definitely privilege to be recognized when being able to choose not to work with companies that work with ICE, but I am kind of at the point where I feel like the privilege lays more on the other side - the ability to work on code knowing your leadership is profiting off of oppression and you're making a salary off of it.
I don't have the answers right now to how to solve all of this, I'm basically at the level in my visibility and career and education where I am trying to bring awareness and raise questions. That upsets a lot of people, but so does mass incarceration and tearing apart families - so maybe it's time the rest of us get uncomfortable for once and use our power to do something powerful and positive.