Reparations

One issue I’m really interested in working on is reparations for slavery and colonization, particularly in the United States. This is a pretty big idea but I think reparations are an essential part of working towards reconciling a lot of unjust foundations that this world is built upon.

Law: Echoing the calls for reparations that Ta-Nehisi Coates made in his well-known article (The Case for Reparations), reparations policies could go through law and be made into policies that provide direct reparative resources, such as land, symbolic reparation, and financial stipends. For example, the conversation on land restitution in South Africa is an example of how the U.S. government could think about going about providing reparations for slavery and even Jim Crow-era policy.

Norm: Public information campaigns to normalize reparations and wealth redistribution on an everyday basis and make known the idea that reparations should be instituted in some form for slavery and colonization of indigenous land in the U.S.

Market: Institute some “micro-finance” type of program (but not loan-based, just giving money) which might incentivize well-resourced people and corporations to help provide the conditions for marginalized people to succeed and gain capital.

Code: Automate the transfer of some small portion of funds of payment systems to go towards reparations funds. For example, some portion of tuition payments could be pooled to pay for tuition for descendants of enslaved people as was demanded of Georgetown University due to its history of being built upon the foundation of the slave trade.

Data Transparency

I have background in social sciences, particularly ethnic studies, so another project I am interested in is “open data”-related work (e.g. Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences) especially in connection with police departments around the country.

Law: Update data transparency laws, with collaboration from current developers and data scientists so there are clear standards. In a similar vein to financial accountability laws, police departments should be required by law to make statistics on race, income, gender, sexuality, incarceration rate vs. offense, salaries, financial statements, etc. public.

Norm: Show people how lack of data can be leveraged against marginalized populations (e.g. lack of detailed Asian American data makes it so that the wealth disparities among Asian Americans can be glossed over without addressing South-East Asian and other Asian American populations that are not at all represented by the “Crazy Rich Asian” stats)

Market: The norm lever could be combined with the market one to have consumers and public funders to go against institutions with low data transparency, which is against the market interest of the actor.

Code: I think a lot of this problem has to do with the amount of resources people are even willing to put into data transparency, so the availability of code seems to not be the issue here (since the potential to collect detailed data or publish it already exists). One idea I had is that you could automatically log police officer actions somehow and push them to a publicly accessible database for accountability.

Bail

We talked about this a little in class when discussing mass incarceration, but the current cash bail system and the bail bond industry that’s been built upon it has huge potential for and realities of abuse which overwhelmingly targets poor people in a massively unfair way, and has been shown to be linked to higher actual incarceration rates when people actually do go to trial. Pre-trial detention based on how much you are able to pay is unjust, but current methods of dealing with it by using things like algorithms are also filled with potential to be wrong and prejudiced.

Law: Eliminiate cash bail, then figure out some legal standards for pre-trial detention (do we want it, when are we going to implement it, thorough standards for making sure whatever metric for using pre-trial detention is instituted are not biased if possible)

Norms: Talk about cash bail and how it’s unfair. Especially bail bonds — it seems to be pretty normalized in the U.S. which was weird coming from Canada, but when I talked to people I know here they seemed to just accept bail bonds as something that happens in life. Not great!

Market: Disincentivize bail bond companies and insurance companies that back them in some way. Implement huge taxes on bail bond income or something (although this is combined with law in a big way).

Code: Reduce the use of cash bail by overhauling the pre-trial detention system in the first place.