Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age

Digitize and Punish is a comprehensive study of the use of digital technology in American criminal justice. Brian Jefferson shows how the 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. After examining how the criminal justice system conceptualized the benefits of computers to surveil criminalized populations, Jefferson focuses on New York City and Chicago to provide a grounded account of the deployment of digital computing in urban police departments. This conversation between Jefferson and University of Minnesota Press senior editor Pieter Martin was recorded in July 2020. More about the book: z.umn.edu/digitizeandpunish A transcript of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-digitizeandpunish