Virginia Eubanks is the author of a new book,
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. From the transcript of her interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro:
SHAPIRO: Virginia Eubanks argues that many of the automated systems that deliver public services today are rigged against the people these programs are supposed to serve. She dives deep into three examples of automated public services - welfare benefits in Indiana, housing for the homeless in Los Angeles and children's services in Allegheny County, Pa., which includes Pittsburgh.
The Indiana case was so bad that the state eventually gave up on the automated system. Virginia Eubanks started by telling me what state lawmakers were trying to accomplish through automation.
EUBANKS: Indiana was attempting to save money and to make the system more efficient. But the way the system rolled out, it seems like one of the intentions was actually to break the relationship between caseworkers and the families they served. The governor sort of did a press tour around this contract. And one of the things he kept bringing up was there was one case where two case workers had colluded with some recipients to defraud the government for about - I think it was about $8,000.
And the governor used this case over and over and over again to suggest that when caseworkers and families have personal relationships, that it's an invitation to fraud. So the system was actually designed to break that relationship. So what happened is the state replaced about 1,500 local caseworkers with online forms and regional call centers.
And that resulted in a million benefits denials in the first three years of the experiment, which was a 54 percent increase from the three years before.
SHAPIRO: Is an automated system of public services inherently going to be less helpful, less effective than something like Uber or Lyft or Amazon or all the automated things that people who are not in poverty rely on every day?
EUBANKS: No. There's nothing intrinsic in automation that makes it bad for the poor. One of my greatest fears...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
Virginia Eubanks is the author of a new book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. From the transcript of her interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro: