Using AI for Tracking Systemic Racism in Historical Carceral Systems

This project seeks to create an interdisciplinary and collaborative platform to address the use of AI-driven "proactive" information systems in tracking systemic racism in the genesis of modern carceral systems in the Atlantic World. By bringing together the expertise of historians, computer scientists, software developers, political scientists and law experts, we aim to better understand the impact that historical prison systems had in defining and perpetuating forms of interrelated racial, class and gender violence and discrimination in colonial and postcolonial societies of in the Americas, Europe and Africa.

Building on the ongoing research on Havana’s Royal Prison Logbooks, led by Dr Sanjurjo, and Dr Moshfeghi extensive experience in Natural Language Processing, Language Modeling, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning techniques to create innovative solutions, this project seeks to track the emergence of structural racism and mass incarceration as a system of governance across the Atlantic world and thereby historicise racial and class disparities in prison populations today.

In the long term, this project has the potential to fundamentally reshape our understanding of structural racism and violence in carceral systems by allowing researchers to track demographic shifts in prison populations over time. The anticipated outcomes of this project would be invaluable not only for historians and other academic scholars but also for policymakers, security services and third-sector organisations interested in prison reform. These outputs will lay a solid foundation for the second stage envisioned for this project, which we hope to undertake with a Horizon Europe (Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society cluster) grant.