ARE PRISONERS HUMAN BEINGS?

Based on my 2021 paper “Are Prisoners Human Beings?”, which argued that the incarcerated suffer from systemic environmental and social injustice, especially due to race and poverty. A reflective essay on how we can meaningfully build on this framework to analyze emerging dynamics in the 2020s and beyond.

I extend this thesis based on class-based criminalization (1970s–1990s) with the emerging techno-socioeconomic divide of the AI age.

America is the poster child for the construction of hundreds of new concrete jungles known as prisons. While we may lose the race against China in artificial intelligence, we surpass all neighboring countries in rates of imprisonment. It has increased 500 percent over a few decades. These facilities are complex systems deeply rooted in state and private funding, often driven by ulterior motives that disregard those most important: the imprisoned. As the War on Drugs raged during the 1980s, mass incarceration came to life in the form of modern-day slavery, giving way to “the new Jim Crow”. With the rapid increase in arrests and convictions, America needed to house the newly incarcerated quickly, but lacked the public funds to do so. Then came private prisons: a profit-based industry willing to construct prisons while lining their pockets based on headcounts, tied to prison towns whose economies depend on incarceration.

Mass incarceration exists and grows not in spite of but by way of our public defense system.

MATTHEW CALDWELL

In 2021, I titled this piece “Are Prisoners Human Beings?”—a question that remains largely unresolved. Today, that question must be extended. While racialized incarceration persists, we now face a new and rapidly advancing axis of inequality: the divide between those with access to artificial intelligence and those left outside the technological bubble. The American landscape is shifting, focusing less on skin color alone and more on who can stay ahead of the technological curve with adaptable skillsets, and who is left behind by systems they were never equipped to understand.

Although new prisons continue to appear across the United States each year, detention centers remain abstract in the public mind, despite being funded by taxpayer dollars. The truth is, prisons are no stranger to violating basic human rights. In fact, prisoners are the most marginalized group due to the belief that they no longer deserve rights as the price for committing a crime. But who are we to decide such a fate? That decision goes beyond any court-sanctioned sentence. As a society, we tend to rightfully worry for nearby communities affected by the presence of a new industrial facility. But consider those who live within such a facility—in this case, a prison—unable to leave for years, and for some, the rest of their lives. The incarcerated suffer at the forefront of environmental injustices, often unable to be heard.

Through the lens of utilitarianism, I previously argued that a clean environment is fundamental to human health and that it is a right that cannot be overlooked. Furthermore, the incorporation of nature into prison settings must be present if the American justice system is to reform rather than simply warehouse people. But what happens when the very concept of “justice” evolves? What happens when harm is no longer just physical or environmental, but rooted in exclusion from access, data rights, and algorithmic manipulation?

If the United States is serious about addressing these high levels of concentrated violence then it has to be serious about addressing the country's high levels of inequality and concentrated poverty. The only way out is to develop a new social and economic agenda that designates the alleviation of the unconscionably high rates of hunger, poverty, and joblessness that vex these communities as a top priority, not a public policy afterthought. This would necessitate an infusion of resources and new policies and programs to address persistent residential segregation, inadequate investments in good housing, and disparate access to equitable residential loans and quality public education.

MARIE GOTTSCHALK

We now face a new threshold. The 1970s through the 1990s saw heightened crime rates and the implementation of racially coded policies targeting poor and Black communities. Today, in the AI-dominated age, society’s marginalization tactics are evolving. While the incarcerated still bear the burden of environmental degradation, another vulnerable class is emerging: the technologically displaced.

Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It mirrors long-standing systems of power and dominance, where one group claims superiority over another. AI, controlled by those with the knowledge and resources to wield it, becomes a new instrument of stratification. This new divide is no longer defined solely by race, but by access to data, technical fluency, and participation in the digital economy. We are witnessing the early stages of what could be called technological incarceration. Society will reflect a system where people are not physically behind bars but are nonetheless confined by digital illiteracy, predictive surveillance, and economic exclusion.

As history tells us, the lack of access to a well-paying job increases the likelihood of crime born out of desperation. The American government will soon be forced to confront what the automation of many occupations means for those left behind. Much like prisoners placed beside toxic coal refuse in SCI Fayette, this emerging underclass faces long-term exposure—not to ash, but to data bias, algorithmic unemployment, and information asymmetry. These silent hardships are already unfolding, whether it’s an algorithm rejecting your resume or a predictive model denying your mortgage.

Today’s tech policies rarely account for how automated decision-making systems disproportionately harm non-technical users, who are often poor, elderly, or systemically disadvantaged. The attention economy, as Jenny Odell calls it, profits from distraction. It leaves us unaware of prisons, unaware of organized activism, and now unaware of who is being left behind in the race toward automation. We need stories. We need to bridge the technological front with the lived experiences of everyday Americans. We need moral narratives that make visible the new invisible. As we once asked whether prisoners were human beings, we must now ask: are the technologically excluded still important? Still participants in democracy? It is worth questioning how a divided public can be expected to vote with any unity of purpose when so many are structurally removed from the systems that shape their lives.

A society that exalts artificial intelligence while ignoring natural intelligence of empathy, justice, and reform will not find itself in a digital utopia. It will find itself in a new form of segregation.