MEASURES PROPOSED TO ENABLE A ‘TECH-LED APPROACH TO JUSTICE’
A range of measures to enable a ‘tech-led approach to justice’ were explored last month at a meeting chaired by Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Attendees discussed wearable technologies, behaviour monitoring and geolocation to create a ‘prison outside of prison’.
Measures proposed by technology companies included:
- tracking devices to be inserted under offenders’ skin
- robots assigned to contain offenders
- driverless vehicles used to transport prisoners
Other suggestions included using high-powered quantum computers to ‘analyse past data to predict future behaviours and create diversion paths’ and to automate sentencing calculations in the overstretched probation service.
The push by the Ministry of Justice follows last month’s review of sentencing by the former justice secretary David Gauke, which called for greater use of AI to help reduce the prison population by almost 10,000.
Human rights campaigners have called the ideas ‘alarmingly dystopian’.
‘The idea that tech companies can produce tools to ‘predict’ crime has been discredited time and again – it is disappointing to see that they are continuing to push it – and that the MoJ is so willing to listen.’ Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at Foxglove
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