2pm on 2-9-2024 and 9am on 2-10-2024
Prediction and Punishment: Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Carceral AI
Center for Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburgh
This cross-disciplinary workshop will provide an interactive meeting point for researchers to address the expanding use of AI in criminal legal contexts. We use the term ‘carceral AI’ to refer to a broad class of algorithmic and data-driven practices implicated in the control and incarceration of people. Examples include predictive policing, facial recognition, recidivism risk assessment instruments, automatic license plate readers, border surveillance systems, biometric databases, electronic monitoring, and audio gunshot locators. Such technologies are often introduced as ‘smart’, ‘evidence-based’, or ‘data-driven’ reforms that claim to reduce bias and increase efficiency, such as ‘evidence-based’ sentencing and ‘smart’ borders. In practice, however, AI systems can interact in complicated ways with existing social and legal structures, reinforce or mask existing structural injustices, and expand the reach of carceral systems under the guise of scientific rigor. Participants in this workshop are invited to explore how such technologies both inform and interact with topics including incarceration, policing, migration, privatization, surveillance, racial and gender justice, and resistance. We welcome contributions from civil society organizations and academic researchers from disciplines including but not limited to philosophy, law, and the social sciences. Participants will be invited to contribute to a special report on carceral AI.
Keynote Speakers:
Shakeer Rahman, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition
Megan Stevenson, University of Virginia Law School
Pablo Nuñez, Centro de Estudos de Segurança e Cidadania (CESeC)
Gabbrielle Johnson, Claremont McKenna College, Department of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
1008 Cathedral of Learning
4200 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, Pe 15213
click here for Google Maps
Submission deadline: September 30, 2023. Submissions should include: (1) a 1-2 sentence biography of the participant, (2) a 1-2 sentence statement of interest for attending the workshop, and (3) an abstract or a description of your proposed contribution of no more than 500 words.
Please send submissions to carceral.ai@gmail.com. Notifications will be sent in October, 2023.
We encourage early career researchers and individuals working in a range of organizations and disciplines to submit proposals. We particularly welcome submissions from members of underrepresented groups and perspectives from the Global South.
We will fully fund up to 3 nights of housing for all participants and will partially fund travel to Pittsburgh.
Further inquiries may be addressed to Dasha Pruss (dpruss@fas.harvard.edu).
Organizers: Dasha Pruss (Berkman Klein Center and Department of Philosophy, Harvard University)
Colin Allen (Department of Philosophy, University of California Santa Barbara)