The Carceral Archive: Documentary Records, Narrative Construction, and Predictive Risk Assessment
Over the past three decades, scholarship in sociology, criminology, law, public policy, history, science and technology studies (STS), and other allied fields has addressed various areas of concern at the intersections of race and correctional supervision in the United States. Some scholars have argued that the modern day prison industrial complex is a transparent extension of chattel slavery, while others have asserted that a ubiquity of carceral ideologies has contributed to a broader social inequality—one so affecting as to prevent people from oppressed and marginalized communities from full participation in American life. This scholarship unambiguously attests to ongoing disparities in rates of incarceration calculated along the indices of race and ethnicity; with data cultures expanding—evidenced by growth in sectors such as big data, data science, and data analytics—in the sociocultural landscapes and sociotechnical environments of the United States, more recent scholarship has focused on the ways that technology also contributes to—and often exacerbates—these disparities.