#talitrix

Fulton County’s jails are in real trouble: “[Inmates] are sleeping on the floor in plastic trays. Cell doors hang off hinges, footage from one local news report shows, and leaked water pools on the floor in some areas. Last September, one person was found dead and covered in bed bugs.” The funding to buy Talitrix tracking bracelets is part of an emergency cash infusion triggered by outrage (and litigation risk) over these inhumane conditions. But the hundreds of sensors being studded throughout the county’s jails and the expensive tracking cuffs are obviously solving the wrong problems, like “how do we stop prisoners living under these inhumane conditions from erupting in violence, or taking their own lives?” (For avoidance of doubt, the right question to answer is “How do we eliminate these inhumane conditions and focus on rehabilitation?”)

Bottom line: no one gets rich by improving prison conditions. There is no business model for making prisons humane centers of rehabilitation that help people with real problems address those problems, re-enter society and reconcile with the people they transgressed upon. By contrast, selling expensive prison-tech to sheriff’s departments yields a profit, some of which can be diverted into hiring more salespeople who court procurement officers with a slick pitch about how their gadgets can make their lives easier. In other words, people who merely want to hire more counselors and therapists; improve prison libraries, training and food; and help prisoners after they serve their time will never produce better PowerPoints, expensive junkets, lavish sales dinners, elaborate trade-show booths, and slick brochures than the profiteers.

The appetite for hurting people with shitty technology boundless. It will never be content to extract from the most easily oppressed among us. If we allow companies to wax fat on public funds to hurt the most powerless, they will build up a war-chest that lets it come after the rest of us. Today’s prisoner-tracking technology is tomorrow’s warehouse worker tracking technology, and will next come for office workers — and then for all of us.

The shitty technology adoption curve owes its existence to this fact: solving human need produces public goods that we all benefit from, whereas securing private contracts from public agencies produces a surplus for the contractor that can be laundered into securing more contracts. Evil, in other words, has a business-model.