Tracking devices inserted under offenders’ skin, robots assigned to contain prisoners and driverless vehicles used to transport them were among the measures proposed by technology companies to ministers who are gathering ideas to tackle the crisis in the UK justice system.
Surely we can do better than that?
Those present included representatives of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir, which works closely with the US military and has contracts with the NHS. IBM and the private prison operator Serco also attended alongside tagging and biometric companies, according to a response to a freedom of information request.
Given the fact that very little of this tech works as intended are we sure we want to go down this route?
Mahmood told the tech companies she wants “deeper collaboration between government and tech to solve the prison capacity crisis, reduce reoffending and make communities safer”. She invited them to “scale and improve” the existing use of tagging “not just for monitoring but to drive rehabilitation and reduce crime”.
You can onlt rehabilitate those who wwant to change - just what percentage of the offendfer population does?
Human rights campaigners called the ideas “alarmingly dystopian”...
Of vcourse they did. It's what they do. It's time they were ignored.
This ia what Bliar did with the NHS. He invited tech, as in Billy Bob Gates, to co me in and advise. We ended up with the NPfIT programme that wasted £10B+
ReplyDeleteTech is useful but what would be much better is smaller cell, lock up the long term and permanent detainees for most of the day,. Educate the others and keep the sentences long.