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The scope of criminal justice surveillance, from the police to the prisons, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, health, and marketing. While law enforcement's use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences.

In Policing Data, Sarah Brayne offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world-the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations from over two years of fieldwork with the LAPD, Brayne examines the causes and consequences of big data and algorithmic control. She reveals how the police use predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies to deploy resources, identify criminal suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-driven practices. While big data analytics has the potential to reduce bias, increase efficiency, and improve prediction accuracy, Brayne argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.

A groundbreaking examination of big data policing, this book challenges the way we think about the data-driven supervision law enforcement increasingly imposes upon civilians in the name of objectivity, transparency, and twenty-first century policing.

A multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy that spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.

As Karen Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.

“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.”

What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.

With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”

Tracing the rise of digital computing in policing and punishment and its harmful impact on criminalized communities of color

Brian Jefferson explores the history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years. He shows how digital technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation’s racialized policing and punishment.

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.

To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.

We're tasked with making interfaces for more users in more contexts using more browsers on more devices with more screen sizes and more capabilities than ever before. That's a daunting task indeed. Thankfully, design systems are here to help.

Atomic Design details all that goes into creating and maintaining robust design systems, allowing you to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster than ever before. This book introduces a methodology for thinking of our UIs as thoughtful hierarchies, discusses the qualities of effective pattern libraries, and showcases techniques to transform your team's design and development workflow.

Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, “starter witch kits” of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.

In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life—Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

Tracing the rise of digital computing in policing and punishment and its harmful impact on criminalized communities of color

Brian Jefferson explores the history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years. He shows how digital technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation’s racialized policing and punishment.

The proliferation of data-driven criminal justice operations creates millions of criminal records each year in the United States. Documenting everything from a police stop to a prison sentence, these records take on a digital life of their own as they are collected by law enforcement and courts, posted on government websites, re-posted on social media, online news and mugshot galleries, and bought and sold by data brokers. The result is "digital punishment," where mere suspicion or a brush with the law can have lasting consequences.

In Digital Punishment, Sarah Esther Lageson unpacks criminal recordkeeping in the digital age, as busy and overburdened criminal justice agencies turned to technological solutions offered by IT companies over the last two decades. These operations produce a mountain of data, including the names, photographs, and home addresses of people arrested or charged with a crime, transforming millions of paper records into a digital commodity. Regardless of factual or legal guilt, these records rapidly multiply across the private sector background checking and personal data industries.

Emboldened by public records laws designed for paper-based systems, criminal record data has become an extremely valuable resource for employers, landlords, and communities to monitor criminal behavior and assess other people. But while transparency laws were originally designed to allow governmental watchdogging, digital punishment has redirected our gaze toward one another. Hundreds of interviews detailed in this book reveal the consequences of digital punishment, as people purposefully opt out of society to cope with privacy and due process violations. As criminal histories impact nearly every aspect of private and civic life, the collateral consequences of even the most minor records are much more than barriers to employment and housing. For the criminal record-holder, the messy entanglement of government bureaucracy is nothing compared to the jurisdiction-less haze of the internet.

Drawing on empirical data, interviews, and review of case law, this book powerfully demonstrates that addressing digital punishment will require a direct acknowledgement of privacy and dignity in the context of public accusation, and a reckoning of how rehabilitation can actually occur in a society that never forgets.

Over the last three decades, welfare policies have been informed by popular beliefs that welfare fraud is rampant. As a result, welfare policies have become more punitive and the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system have blurred--so much so that in some locales prosecution caseloads for welfare fraud exceed welfare caseloads. In reality, some recipients manipulate the welfare system for their own ends, others are gravely hurt by punitive policies, and still others fall somewhere in between.

In Cheating Welfare, Kaaryn S. Gustafson endeavors to clear up these gray areas by providing insights into the history, social construction, and lived experience of welfare. She shows why cheating is all but inevitable--not because poor people are immoral, but because ordinary individuals navigating complex systems of rules are likely to become entangled despite their best efforts. Through an examination of the construction of the crime we know as welfare fraud, which she bases on in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in Northern California, Gustafson challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, welfare recipients, and crime control in the United States.