{"id":187640,"date":"2025-08-30T17:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T17:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/187640\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T17:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T17:14:11","slug":"ai-in-prison-robot-guards-how-the-criminal-justice-system-is-adopting-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/187640\/","title":{"rendered":"AI in Prison? Robot Guards? How the Criminal Justice System Is Adopting Tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is The Marshall Project\u2019s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In July, Tesla fans lined up for hours in Los Angeles<\/a> to check out the new \u201cretro-futuristic\u201d diner and charging station opened by Elon Musk. Among the attractions was the company\u2019s \u201cOptimus\u201d robot, which served popcorn to hungry customers<\/a> near the humans grilling Wagyu burgers. Fifty miles east in Chino, Delinia Lewis, the associate warden of the California Institution for Women, hopes to one day put AI-powered machines like these to work in her prison doing far more important jobs than slinging snacks. As staffing shortages continue<\/a> to plague prisons around the country<\/a>, Lewis believes AI could help close the gap.<\/p>\n

\u201cMedicine distribution, cell feeding, security searches, package searches for fentanyl, all the hazardous and routine tasks that staff don’t want to do,\u201d said Lewis. \u201cWhy not let the robot do it? Then staff can focus on more intricate parts of the job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lewis has written about the use of AI in corrections<\/a>, and said she is forming a business to produce AI-driven robots for use in corrections settings. While she hopes the tech could be employed within the next 10 years, the state\u2019s budget crisis<\/a> makes acquiring cutting-edge AI tools tough.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho knows when California will be back in the green,\u201d Lewis said of the state\u2019s budget, \u201cbut we are losing staff at a record rate, so the bridge has got to break, and we\u2019ve gotta really take advantage of technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robots behind bars may be a ways off, but prisons and jails have been rapidly adopting other AI and machine-learning tools. Advocates critical of the technology are concerned about opaque data collection processes, privacy violations and bias.<\/p>\n

Prison telecommunications companies were some of the<\/a> first to dip their toes in AI technology. In 2017, LeoTech began marketing Verus, a phone surveillance tool to record and monitor calls<\/a>. The company uses Amazon\u2019s cloud and transcription services<\/a> to flag keywords that might alert staff to \u201cvaluable intelligence.\u201d At least three states used the tool to monitor phone calls for mentions of coronavirus<\/a> during the pandemic, in an attempt to track outbreaks, according to The Intercept. While tools like Verus were originally marketed as add-ons to existing phone services, many prison telecommunications giants have since made AI call monitoring a default part of their services.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven Securus and Global Tel Link are now providing it, it means it\u2019s going to be a lot more accessible in a lot more places,\u201d said Beryl Lipton, an expert on law enforcement and prison surveillance tools at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.<\/p>\n

The use of these tools has led to serious breaches of attorney-client privilege. Over the last five years, lawsuits have been filed in several states<\/a> against Securus, alleging that the company recorded privileged calls<\/a>. Securus has settled some of the lawsuits and has denied purposely recording protected calls. The controversy hasn\u2019t stopped corrections departments from using the technology, or vendors from marketing it. LeoTech has been lobbying in Ohio, where lawmakers passed a budget this year<\/a> that includes $1 million for the state\u2019s prison system to pay for software that will \u201ctranscribe and analyze all inmate phone calls\u201d beginning next year, according to Signal Ohio. Florida inked a deal<\/a> with LeoTech in 2023.<\/p>\n

Lipton\u2019s primary concern with the AI tools in prisons and police departments<\/a> is how the data they gather<\/a> is stored, retained, and later fed into other systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cLaw enforcement and the companies helping them do this are very interested in collecting all the information they possibly can collect on somebody, because they think this is going to aid them in solving or preventing a future crime,\u201d said Lipton.<\/p>\n

While some AI technology is making its way into the system, in some ways, the U.S. is playing catch-up with other countries. Last month, the United Kingdom\u2019s Ministry of Justice laid out its plan<\/a> to embed AI across prisons, probation services and courts. Some of the agency\u2019s goals include integrating AI transcription and document processing tools for probation officers, and the creation of a \u201cdigital assistant\u2026to help families resolve child arrangement disputes outside of court.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the star of the announcement is a new \u201cAI violence predictor<\/a>\u201d that promises to prevent prison violence by analyzing data, including an incarcerated person\u2019s age<\/a> and previous involvement in violent incidents. If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of risk assessment tools<\/a> that have long been used<\/a> across the U.S.<\/a>, which ProPublica documented nearly 10 years ago to be rife with racial bias and \u201cremarkably unreliable in forecasting violent crime.\u201d The older tools generally assess risk by considering a set of weighted variables \u2014 such as age and prior convictions \u2014 either manually or by using an algorithm. AI-driven \u201cpredictors\u201d are like risk assessment tools on steroids, drawing on much larger datasets.<\/p>\n

While today\u2019s AI-driven tools are more sophisticated<\/a> in some ways, the risk for bias and error is still there, and the efficacy of predictive tools<\/a> has repeatedly been called into question<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of these predictive tools can create unintended errors where certain communities are underserved or misunderstood because of how the model missed or wrongly accounted for individuals\u2019 risks in that community,\u201d said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, who has studied AI surveillance in prisons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In addition to predicting violence against others, some correctional staff are looking to use \u201cbiometric behavioral profiling<\/a>\u201d tools in combination with AI to prevent in-custody deaths<\/a> and medical emergencies. The Maricopa County Sheriff\u2019s Office, in Arizona, wants to buy wearable technology to track heart rate, body temperature, and other \u201ckey indicators,\u201d according to AZ Central<\/a>. Jails in Colorado, Alabama, and elsewhere in Arizona have already begun using similar tools<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lewis, the associate warden in California, is well aware of the ethical concerns that come with AI tools, and believes criticism will ultimately produce better outcomes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI welcome concerns, because that gives us an opportunity to do more research and resolve those concerns,\u201d said Lewis. \u201cI don’t think it’s going to inhibit us, I think it’s just going to help us make a more advanced and a better product.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is The Marshall Project\u2019s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":187641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,276,66,224,105104,105101,105105,105106,105103,753,22269,158,67,132,68,105102],"class_list":{"0":"post-187640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-los-angeles","13":"tag-prison-health","14":"tag-prison-life","15":"tag-prison-technology","16":"tag-prison-understaffing","17":"tag-privacy-rights","18":"tag-robots","19":"tag-surveillance","20":"tag-technology","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-warrantless-surveillance"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115118844986098359","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}