Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

by Virginia Eubanks

neighborhoods, enter the health-care system, or cross national borders. That data acts to reinforce their marginality when it is used to

Technologies of poverty management are not neutral. They are shaped by our nation’s fear of economic insecurity and hatred of the poor; they in turn shape the politics and experience of poverty.

Today, I mostly hear that the new regime of data constricts poor and working-class people’s opportunities, demobilizes their political organizing, limits their movement, and undercuts their human rights. What has happened since 2007 to alter so many people’s hopes and dreams? How has the digital revolution become a nightmare for so many?

What happened after 2007?

And while the most sweeping digital decision-making tools are tested in what could be called “low rights environments” where there are few expectations of political accountability and transparency, systems first designed for the poor will eventually be used on everyone.

Low-rights environment

Today, we have forged what I call a digital poorhouse from databases, algorithms, and risk models. It promises to eclipse the reach and repercussions of everything that came before.

Digital poorhouse

For all their high-tech polish, our modern systems of poverty management—automated decision-making, data mining, and predictive analytics—retain a remarkable kinship with the poorhouses of the past. Our new digital tools spring from punitive, moralistic views of poverty and create a system of high-tech containment and investigation.

Our national journey from the county poorhouse of the nineteenth century to the digital poorhouse today reveals a remarkably durable debate between those who wish to eliminate and alleviate poverty and those who blame, imprison, and punish the poor.

People who wat to end poverty and thoe who blame the poor for.it.

shirking.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began when workers for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad learned that their wages would be cut yet again—to half their 1873 levels—while the railroad’s shareholders took home a 10 percent dividend. Railroad workers stepped off their trains, decoupled engines, and refused to let freight traffic through their yards. As historian Michael Bellesiles recounts in 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently,

The depression also affected Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Britain. In response, European governments introduced the modern welfare state. But in America, middle-class commentators stoked fears of class warfare and a “great Communist wave.”7 As they had following the 1819 Panic, white economic elites responded to the growing militancy of poor and working-class people by attacking welfare. They asked: How can legitimate need be tested in a communal lodging house? How can one enforce work and provide free soup at the same time? In response, a new kind of social reform—the scientific charity movement—began an all-out attack on public poor relief.

Scientific charity treated the poor as criminal defendants by default. Scientific charity workers advised in-depth investigation of applications for relief because they believed that there was a hereditary division between deserving and undeserving poor whites.

Deserving and undeserving poor whites

The movement’s focus on heredity was influenced by the incredibly popular eugenics movement. The British strain of eugenics, originated by Sir Francis Galton, encouraged planned breeding of elites for their “noble qualities.” But in America, eugenics practitioners quickly turned their attention to eliminating what they saw as negative characteristics of the poor: low intelligence, criminality, and unrestricted sexuality.

Eugenics created the first database of the poor.

Eugenics created fthe first database o the poor

From a Carnegie Institution–funded laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and state eugenics records offices stretching from Vermont to California, social scientists fanned out across the United States to gather information about poor people’s sex lives, intelligence, habits, and behavior. They filled out lengthy questionnaires, took photographs, inked fingerprints, measured heads, counted children, plotted fam...

Both eugenics and scientific charity amassed hundreds of thousands of family case studies in what George Buzelle, general secretary of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, characterized as an effort to “arrange all the human family according to intellect, development, merit, and demerit, each with a label ready for indexing and filing away.”10

The scientific charity movement relied on a slew of new inventions: the caseworker, the relief investigation, the eugenics record, the data clearinghouse. It drew on what lawyers, academics, and doctors believed to be the most empirically sophisticated science of its time. Scientific charity staked a claim to evidence-based practice in order to distinguish itself from what its proponents saw as the soft-headed emotional, or corruption-laden political, approaches to poor relief of the past. But the movement’s high-tech tools and scientific rationales were actually systems for disempowering poor and working-class people, denying their human rights, and violating their autonomy.

The New Deal reversed the trend toward private charity,

New deal v private charity

they abandoned the in-depth investigations pioneered by scientific charity caseworkers.

But the New Deal also created racial, gender, and class divisions that continue to produce inequities in our society today.

The National Housing Act of 1934 redoubled the burden on Black neighborhoods by promoting residential segregation and encouraging mortgage redlining.

Excluded workers, single mothers, the elderly poor, the ill, and the disabled were forced to rely on what welfare historian Premilla Nadasen calls “mop-up” public assistance programs.

In distinguishing between social insurance and public assistance, New Deal Democrats planted the seeds of today’s economic inequality, capitulated to white supremacy, sowed conflict between the poor and the working class, and devalued women’s work. By abandoning the idea of a universal benefits program, Roosevelt resurrected scientific charity’s investigation, policing, and diversion. But rather than being directed at a broad spectrum of the poor and working class, these techniques were selectively applied to a new target group that was just emerging. They would come to be known as “welfare mothers.”

Social insurance v public assistance

Fleeing white supremacist terrorism and sharecropper evictions in the south, more than three million African Americans moved to northern cities between 1940 and 1960.

The welfare rights movement shared information about eligibility, helped fill out applications, sat-in in welfare offices to challenge discriminatory practices, lobbied legislatures, crafted policies, and challenged all the assumptions that New Deal programs had left unquestioned.

Welfare rights movement

National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).

NWRO

A victory in King v. Smith (1968) overturned the “substitute father” rule and guaranteed basic rights of personal and sexual privacy. In Shapiro v. Thompson (1969), the Supreme Court agreed that residency rules were unconstitutional restrictions of a person’s right to mobility. Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) enshrined the principle that public assistance recipients have a right to due process, and that benefits cannot be terminated without a fair hearing.

Victories of the welfare rights movement

As eligibility limitations were struck down, AFDC expanded. The raw numbers are startling: there were 3.2 million recipients of AFDC in 1961 but almost 10 million in 1971. Federal spending on the program increased from $1 billion (in 1971 dollars) to $3.3 billion over the same decade. Most of the movement’s gains went to poor children. Only a quarter of poor children received support from AFDC in 1966; by 1973, the program reached more than four-fifths of them.

Stories about welfare fraud and abuse were most likely to contain images of Black faces. African American poverty decreased dramatically during the 1960s and the African American share of AFDC caseloads declined. But the percentage of African Americans represented in news magazine stories about poverty jumped from 27 to 72 percent between 1964 and 1967.

Elected officials and state bureaucrats, caught between increasingly stringent legal protections and demands to contain public assistance spending, performed a political sleight of hand. They commissioned expansive new technologies that promised to save money by distributing aid more efficiently.

The conflict between the expanding legal rights of welfare recipients and weakened support for public assistance was resolved by a wave of high-tech tools.

Important

Rockefeller announced a statewide welfare reform package that established one-year residency requirements and proposed a “voluntary resettlement plan” offering current welfare recipients transportation and a cash bonus if they agreed to move out of state.

In 1970

Berlinger proposed a central computerized registry for every welfare, Medicaid, and food stamp recipient in the state. Planners folded Rockefeller’s fixation with ending the welfare “gravy train” into the system’s design.

A combination of restrictive new rules and high-tech tools reversed the gains of the welfare rights movement. In 1973, nearly half of the people living under the poverty line in the United States received AFDC. A decade later, after the new technologies of welfare administration were introduced, the proportion had dropped to 30 percent. Today, it is less than 10 percent.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 is often held responsible for the demise of welfare. The PRWORA replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and enforced work outside the home at any cost.

Afdc became TANF

But the process of winnowing the rolls began long before Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.” More aggressive investigation and increasingly precise tracking technologies provided raw material for apocryphal stories about widespread corruption and fraud.

Tracking technologies provided raw material for stories of abuse which in turn justified the need for more technologies

the new regime of data analytics is more evolution than revolution. It is simply an expansion and continuation of moralistic and punitive poverty management strategies that have been with us since the 1820s.

Social assistance is recast as charity, mutual aid is reconstructed as dependency, and new techniques to turn back the progress of the poor proliferate. A well-funded, widely supported, and wildly successful counter-movement to deny basic human rights to poor and working-class people has grown steadily since the 1970s.

heaves

Life or haul with great effort

marooned

Abandoned in an uninhabited area

stalks

Stem of a plant

The old system involved caseworkers developing one-on-one relationships with individuals and families and following cases through to completion. The new system was “self-serve,” technology-focused, and presented call center workers with a list of tasks to complete rather than a docket of families to serve. No one worker had oversight of a case from beginning to end; when clients called the 1-800 number, they always spoke to a new worker.

Because the Daniels administration saw relationships between caseworkers and clients as invitations to fraud, the system was designed to sever those links.

Creating alienation

the redefinition of welfare benefits as the personal property of the recipient, rather than as charity that can be bestowed or denied on a whim.

In 1968, eight individuals denied due process in New York launched a class action lawsuit that led to a Supreme Court decision in Goldberg v. Kelly. This landmark case found that all welfare recipients have a right to an evidentiary hearing—a process that includes timely and adequate notice, disclosure of opposing evidence, an impartial decision-maker, cross-examination of witnesses, and the right to retain legal representation—before their benefits can be terminated.

Supreme court case that determines that all have a righbt to an evidentiary trial before benefits are terminated.

cardigan

The problem with the automation experiment was not that the IBM/ACS coalition failed to deliver, it was that the state and its private partners refused to anticipate or address the system’s human costs.

“Suitable home” and “employable mother” rules were selectively interpreted to block African American women from claiming their benefits until the rise of the welfare rights movement in the 1970s. “Man in house” and “substitute father” rules legitimized intrusion into their privacy, judgment of their sexuality, and invasions of their homes. Ronald Reagan’s 1976 stump speech about the lavish lifestyle of “welfare queen” Linda Taylor was intended to make the face of welfare both Black and female. “There’s a woman in Chicago,” he said during the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary contest. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”12

The “social specs” for the automation were based on time-worn, race- and class-motivated assumptions about welfare recipients that were encoded into performance metrics and programmed into business processes: they are lazy and must be “prodded” into contributing to their own support, they are sneaky and prone to fraudulent claims, and their burdensome use of public resources must be repeatedly discouraged. Each of these assumptions relies on, and is bolstered by, race- and class-based stereotypes. Poor Black women like Omega Young paid the price.

The Indiana automated eligibility system enhanced the state’s already well-developed diversion apparatus, turbo-charging what must be seen as a remarkably efficient machine for denying applications. By narrowing the gate for public benefits and raising the penalties for noncompliance, it achieved stunning welfare roll reductions. Even under the hybrid system and during the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, drops in the state’s TANF caseload continued to outpace national averages. As poverty in Indiana increased, caseloads dropped. When the governor signed the contract with IBM in 2006, 38 percent of poor families with children were receiving cash benefits from TANF. By 2014, the number had dropped to 8 percent.

By 1921 Skid Row offered all the necessaries for family living: a public school, an emergency hospital, streetcar transportation, churches, factories, workshops, warehouses, and retail. As the population of migrant workers swelled in the 1930s, it became known as the poor man’s district. The neighborhood was filled with inexpensive housing and economic struggle, but also thriving community and vigorous politics.