41 pages • 1-hour read
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
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Key Figures
Virginia Eubanks (Author)
Eubanks, the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, is a political science professor at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her specialties include the intersection of technology with society and its economic consequences; her career includes not only writing and researching, but also labor activism and political journalism.
Eubanks was a founding member of the American think tank New America and contributed to the Our Data Bodies Project, which explores concerns about social justice within communities that are heavily surveilled using technological tools. She was also a founding member of the welfare justice group Our Knowledge, Our Power. Her prior book, Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, also dealt with the topics of human equality and technology.
Sophie Stipes
Sophie is a young girl with cerebral palsy who has a gastronomy tube and requires extra medical and educational support. The Stipeses operate a farm; after Sophie’s father Kevin lost his job in the 2008 economic crisis, the whole family, including seven children, lost health insurance benefits.
During the Indiana welfare experiment, Sophie lost Medicaid benefits. Although her mother Kim applied for low-income healthcare assistance, the automated eligibility system flagged something as incorrect. Without explaining what needed to be fixed, the system instead sent Sophie a letter accusing her of “failure to cooperate” and giving her three days to correct the unspecified issue. When Kim called to correct the error, a worker notified her that the rest of the family would also be losing benefits. The Stipeses only managed to reinstate Sophie’s benefits through public protest that attracted TV news coverage.
Gary Boatwright
“Uncle” Gary Boatwright is a 64-year-old man without a home Eubanks interviewed in Los Angeles. After being laid off in the early 2000s from his job as a subprime mortgage lender, Boatwright was unhoused for ten years, surviving with assorted manual labor and skilled jobs.
Boatwright took the VI-SPDAT survey, LA’s coordinated entry system that ranks the unhoused in terms of need, three times, but learned that he needed “a three-to-five-year verifiable rental history and a good credit history in order to qualify for their waiting list” (101) for housing. He also refused to comply with other mandatory steps like surrendering his cell phone.
Angel Shepherd & Patrick Gryzb
Angel and Patrick are the heads of a blended family in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, with multiple generations living under the same roof. Their story is emblematic of how automated systems criminalize the poor.
Patrick and Angel have two children; the family unit is happy despite stretches of unemployment, disability, and other hardships. They rely on public assistance through Allegheny’s automated system, provided by the county’s public assistance office, CYF. Despite a lack of any evidence of abuse, CYF assessed the family as having levels of neglect, relying primarily on factors tied to abject poverty rather than malice. In essence, even though Angel and Patrick had done the morally right thing in getting public assistance for their children when they needed it, their use of the system will negatively impact the quality of care that their children would receive for the future from that same public program.
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