UC Irvine

Over the last few years, punishment and new technologies studies have proposed novel concepts to describe digital technologies’ impacts on the penal field. Currently, ideas such as algorithmic justice and digital punishment portray the use of artificial intelligence by penal agencies and the development of new citizen punishment forms on the internet. However, researchers have not yet systematically analyzed scholarship on criminal justice digitizing.

Through a literature review, this thesis introduces a conceptual model categorizing the ways in which scholars have studied the use of digital technologies in the penal system. This scheme shows the type of questions that researchers have addressed in investigating the penal implementation of digital technologies and establishes argumentative distinctions between these analyses. The thesis poses that studies on penal agencies' digitization have characterized this phenomenon from a critical perspective emphasizing its effective or potentially detrimental consequences for the functioning and foundations of criminal justice. The work conceptualizes this approach under the notion of the accounts of digital perils and divides the latter into a model composed of three categories: the account of algorithmic datafication, the account of socio-digital biases, and the account of juridical distortion.

From the assessment of the accounts of digital perils, the thesis posits that scholars have evaluated from an especially critical prism the questions about how penal agencies employ digital technologies and what consequences their operationalization entails. At the same time, the work demonstrates that, in constructing the accounts of digital perils, researchers have yet to scrutinize with particular attention the reasons explaining the introduction and expansion of digital technologies in the penal system.

Consequently, the thesis examines the relevance of exploring why criminal justice organizations operationalize digital technologies and proposes strategies to address this question. It contends that evaluating the cultural representations surrounding the use of digital technologies in the criminal justice system and the institutional trajectories of penal digitization processes could contribute to generating new accounts around the digital future of the penal field.