Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

In the early 1800s, poorhouses were large warehouses where sick and destitute Americans could work in farms or quarries for minimal pay and a dirty place to sleep. The first American poorhouse was erected in Boston in 1662, but by the 1820s poorhouses became more common, as the economic depression following the War of 1812, which saw wages fall “as much as 80 percent” (17), created what was colloquially known as the “pauper problem.”

The horrors of the poorhouse led to a societal distinction between the impotent and the able poor: The former were wholly incapable of work, and the latter were “just shirking” (17). Poorhouses were designed to be horrific—“overcrowded, ill-ventilated, filthy, insufferably hot in the summer and deathly cold in the winter” (19)—specifically to discourage a habit of seeking aid.

At the same time, poorhouses were also profitable enterprises, preying on the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, like people with physical or cognitive disabilities, who often had nowhere else to go: “Poorhouses were neither debtor’s prisons nor slavery. Those arrested for vagrancy, drunkenness, illicit sex, or begging could be forcibly confined in them. But for many, entry was technically voluntary. The poorhouse was a home of last resort” (20). Left mostly unregulated, poorhouses were the “primary mode of property management” until the Panic of 1873, a “postwar economic boom [that] collapsed under the weight of Gilded Age corruption” (20), and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the first national strike in US history.

While European governments reacted to the post-war recession by introducing welfare systems, the American government advocated for the rise of scientific charity. Scientific charity “argued for more rigorous, data-driven methods to separate the deserving poor from the undeserving” (21), so caseworkers were trained to act as antagonists for their poor clients. Scientific charity also “considered African American poverty a separate issue from white poverty” (24) and began to be associated with eugenics as well as Jim Crow laws. It relied “on a slew of new inventions: the caseworker, the relief investigation, the eugenics record, the data clearinghouse. It drew on what lawyers, academics, and doctors believed to be the most empirically sophisticated science of its time” (24).

Scientific charity was stretched past its breaking point during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when poverty affected so many middle-class whites that the division between deserving and undeserving poor became less clear. Roosevelt’s historic New Deal, which “undoubtedly saved thousands of lives and prevented destitution for millions” (26), created a newly stable, white, and patriarchal middle class. It “reestablished the divide between the able and the impotent poor” (27), uplifting only those able and willing to work.

The civil rights movement of the mid-20th century brought to light concerns about the whitewashed state of social welfare. The two-tier social insurance and public assistance welfare state was born. At the time, “welfare required that poor people trade their rights—to bodily integrity, safe work environments, mobility, political participation, privacy, and self-determination—for meager aid for their families” (29).

Welfare activism, also fueled by emerging second-wave feminism, led to Nixon establishing the Family Assistance Program (FAP) in the late sixties—a meager program that only guaranteed an income far below poverty wages. In the 1970s, New York Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller helped establish the Welfare Management System (WMS). Despite costing $84.5 million, it was ineffective, with fewer and fewer people living under the poverty line receiving assistance each year. When Bill Clinton claimed to end welfare during his time in office, he was continuing “an expansion and continuation of moralistic and punitive poverty management strategies that have been with us since the 1820s” (37).