Automating Inequality Quotes

“In the Buck v. Bell case that legalized involuntary sterilization, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”11 Though the practice fell out of favor in light of Nazi atrocities during World War II, eugenics resulted in more than 60,000 compulsory sterilizations of poor and working-class people in the United States.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“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. Providing aid to the unworthy poor would simply allow them to survive and reproduce their genetically inferior stock. For middle-class reformers of the period, like scientific social worker Frederic Almy, social diagnosis was necessary because “weeds should not have the same culture as flowers.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“From the beginning, the poorhouse served irreconcilable purposes that led to terrible suffering and spiraling costs. On the one hand, the poorhouse was a semi-voluntary institution providing care for the elderly, the frail, the sick, the disabled, orphans, and the mentally ill. On the other, its harsh conditions were meant to discourage the working poor from seeking aid. The mandate to deter the poor drastically undercut the institution’s ability to provide care. Inmates were required to swear a pauper’s oath stripping them of whatever basic civil rights they enjoyed (if they were white and male). Inmates could not vote, marry, or hold office. Families were separated because reformers of the time believed that poor children could be redeemed through contact with wealthy families. Children were taken from their parents and bound out as apprentices or domestics, or sent away on orphan trains as free labor for pioneer farms. Poorhouses provided a multitude of opportunities for personal profit for those who ran them. Part of the keeper of the poorhouse’s pay was provided by unlimited use of the grounds and the labor of inmates.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“Across the country, poor and working-class people are targeted by new tools of digital poverty management and face life-threatening consequences as a result. Automated eligibility systems discourage them from claiming public resources that they need to survive and thrive. Complex integrated databases collect their most personal information, with few safeguards for privacy or data security, while offering almost nothing in return. Predictive models and algorithms tag them as risky investments and problematic parents. Vast complexes of social service, law enforcement, and neighborhood surveillance make their every move visible and offer up their behavior for government, commercial, and public scrutiny”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor