A prison sentence should not mean people lose fundamental human rights such as access to health care or humane conditions of confinement. In Arizona, after almost a decade of broken promises, the ACLU, the Prison Law Office, and their co-counsel are in court proving that state prison officials continue to disregard their constitutional obligations to incarcerated people.

In 2012, the ACLU National Prison Project, the ACLU of Arizona, the Prison Law Office, the Arizona Center for Disability Law, and the law firm of Perkins Coie filed a class action lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) in federal court. The lawsuit challenged ADC’s years of inattention to the health needs of state prisoners and the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement so harsh that they violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That case resulted in a court-approved settlement in 2014 that was meant to protect the rights and health of incarcerated people in ADC’s prisons. What ensued was not reform, but rather years of intransigence by Arizona officials and promises they seemingly never intended to fulfill.

In the seven years since we settled the case, we repeatedly detailed in court filings the preventable suffering and deaths, including deaths by suicide in solitary confinement, that have occurred in Arizona’s prisons. Former prison employees and incarcerated people have bravely come forward to blow the whistle about the inadequate health care and gratuitously cruel treatment of people in isolation units.

The federal judges overseeing the implementation of these reforms have issued numerous enforcement orders and have twice found Arizona officials in contempt of court, fining the state more than $2.5 million for their for-profit health care contractors’ failure to live up to promises to provide basic health care to the people in their prisons. One of the judges wrote in June 2018 that prison officials “are at times more interested in obtaining compliance with the stipulation by playing a shell game than by providing care to the Plaintiff Class.” In February 2021, a different judge overseeing the case again found ADC in contempt of court, writing that “nearing compliance is not enough to avoid sanctions.”

On July 16, 2021, Judge Roslyn O. Silver withdrew the court’s approval of the settlement agreement due to the State’s failure to live up to its constitutional duty to provide adequate health care and prison conditions to incarcerated persons, and set the case for trial to begin Nov. 1, 2021. It is extraordinary not only in prison litigation but in all civil rights impact litigation for a federal court to find state officials in contempt twice in three years, and then to re-set a settled case for trial.

Since July, we have amassed a devastating amount of evidence that we are now presenting to the court during a three-week trial. The evidence shows that ADC has abdicated its responsibility to deliver health care through its merry-go-round of for-profit correctional health care vendors, and incarcerated people continue to suffer excruciating pain and permanent injuries and preventable deaths because of that failure. The evidence also shows that the conditions in ADC’s isolation units are gratuitously cruel, including the indefinite incarceration in solitary confinement of seriously mentally ill persons and children who were convicted as adults. The evidence presented at trial includes expert testimony regarding unconstitutional medical care, mental health care, the psychological effects and conditions in isolation units, and health care staffing.

A large contributing factor to the problems we are presenting to the federal court is Arizona’s overreliance on incarceration. Arizona has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the United States and disproportionately incarcerates communities of color. Black people constitute 5 percent of the state’s population, but 15 percent of people in Arizona’s prisons; 32 percent of the state’s population is Latinx or Hispanic, but they constitute 40 percent of the incarcerated population.

Charging misdemeanors as felonies, throwing thousands of people behind bars instead of offering drug treatment or diversion services, and abusing prosecutorial power to secure guilty pleas are just some of the tactics used that have led to Arizona’s exceedingly high rate of incarceration.

The burden for paying for this broken system largely falls on the back of Arizona taxpayers. Taxpayers pay more than $1.3 billion a year to maintain the prison system — more than they spend on higher education. ADC pays more than $200 million per year to subcontract its medical services to a series of private, for-profit prison health care providers.

More than seven years ago, the state of Arizona made a promise to meet its constitutional obligations to tens of thousands of incarcerated people to improve conditions inside its prisons. We believe that the court will make sure that these promises are finally kept.

In 1956, the Eisenhower administration launched the multibillion-dollar Interstate Highway System, creating a transportation network that indisputably paved the way for immense economic growth. But it also exacted a devastating cost: The new highways were often routed through older, thriving communities, displacing more than 1 million Americans – the vast majority of whom were Black and low-income. In some cities, they cut off Black neighborhoods from quality jobs, schools and housing, solidifying racial and economic segregation. The impact of this disruption is still felt today.

Now, the Biden administration is involved in a similarly game-changing investment – the development of artificial intelligence. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, launched in June, is President Joe Biden’s first contribution to a growing number of federally authorized advisory committees guiding development of AI systems across public and private sectors from housing, employment and credit to the legal system and national security.

But despite Biden’s announced commitment to advancing racial justice, not a single appointee to the task force has focused experience on civil rights and liberties in the development and use of AI. That has to change. Artificial intelligence, invisible but pervasive, affects vast swaths of American society and will affect many more. Biden must ensure that racial equity is prioritized in AI development.

The artificial intelligence at issue refers to computer models, or algorithms, that mimic the cognitive functions of the human mind, such as learning and problem-solving. AI is widely used for automated decision making — analyzing massive amounts of data, finding correlations and then making predictions about future outcomes.

The impact on the daily lives of Americans is unprecedented. Banks and other lenders use AI systems to determine who is eligible for a mortgage or student loan. Housing providers use AI to screen potential tenants. AI decides who’s helped and who’s harmed with influential predictions about who should be jailed pretrial, admitted to college or hired.

So when AI systems are developed in ways that do not adequately take into account existing racism, sexism and other inequities, built-in algorithmic bias can undermine predictive decisions and result in invisible but very real discrimination. As these systems are deployed, they exacerbate existing disparities and create new roadblocks for already-marginalized groups.

For example, the “Educational Redlining” report by the Student Borrower Protection Center found in 2020 that Upstart, a fast-growing AI lending platform, charged higher interest rates and loan fees to borrowers who attended historically Black Howard University or majority Latinx New Mexico State University than it charged those who went to New York University, where Black and Latinx students combined make up only about 30% of the population.

Another example shows how hard such discrimination will be to overcome. In 2018, the ACLU sued Facebook for using algorithms that excluded women from the audience for traditionally male job opportunities such as truck driver or technician, and the social media giant announced sweeping reforms to fix the problem. But an audit three months ago by researchers at the University of Southern California found that Facebook’s ad-delivery system still showed different job ads to women and men.

Despite the reforms, the researchers noted, “Facebook’s algorithms are somehow picking up on the current demographic distribution of these jobs” — which is exactly the kind of historically based bias that needs to be monitored and corrected.

That’s why the Biden administration must act. As the new task force, like other AI advisory committees, helps guide federal policy for AI uses, it’s crucial that its members include civil rights experts who can identify and root out sources of algorithmic bias and push for appropriate oversight mechanisms.

At the same time, the Biden administration must correct President Donald Trump’s willingness to back burner civil rights in pursuit of rapid AI development. In executive orders and a memorandum issued by the Office of Management and Budget, the Trump administration authorized development and expansion of AI in the name of national security without requiring transparency, external oversight, and accountability for biased and discriminatory outcomes. None of these directives has been rescinded.

Back in the 1960s and ’70s, as the collateral damage of interstate highway construction became apparent, “freeway protests” across the country slowed and sometimes stopped the wholesale demolition. But it was easier to mobilize opposition in that case, because the destruction of neighborhoods was plain for all to see.

In contrast, the dangers of AI’s algorithmic bias are invisible, complex and hard to describe. But AI is far more pervasive than a highway system, and far more consequential in the long run. We need to build fair, equitable AI systems so that the United States of the 21st century is equally accessible to everyone. Let’s learn from the mistakes of the past.

The Biden administration must challenge AI’s power to preserve and exacerbate systemic racism. If the president is to carry out his promise of a more just society, voices representing civil rights groups, scholars and impacted communities must have a seat at the table.

This piece was originally published in the Washington Post on August 9, 2021.

The state of Alabama recently adopted new congressional and state legislative districts as the result of its once-in-a-decade redistricting process. These new maps are unconstitutional and grossly gerrymandered in a way that harms Black Alabamians, communities of color, and all Alabamians who care about fair representation. That’s why the ACLU and our partners filed two federal lawsuits today challenging Alabama’s newly drawn state legislative and congressional districts.

Racial gerrymandering occurs when a state uses race as the primary factor in drawing district lines in a way not closely tied to complying with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This often occurs through the practices of “packing” people of color into districts and “cracking” people of color across districts to limit their voting power. “Cracking” refers to splitting communities of color into different districts to prevent them from exercising greater political power. “Packing” refers to placing people of color into the same district in greater numbers than necessary to elect candidates of choice, to prevent people of color from exercising greater political power in surrounding districts.

Using race in drawing district lines can be permissible and indeed necessary in many areas of Alabama to ensure compliance with Section 2, but that was not what the state of Alabama carried out. Rather, the newly drawn maps use race as a means to maintain power.

Alabama’s newly drawn state legislative and congressional districts continue to harm Black Alabamians and other communities of color in several ways. For congressional seats, the new map creates only one district out of seven in which Black Alabamians can elect preferred candidates despite comprising more than 27 percent of Alabama’s voting-age population. It does so by packing a larger number of Black Alabamians into Congressional District 7 than necessary, while cracking other areas of the state with significant Black populations across Congressional Districts 1, 2, and 3.

In the state legislature, the maps pack Black voters into districts in ways that unfairly limit their political power in a number of districts in Jefferson County, Montgomery, Mobile, and Tuscaloosa, while cracking Black communities of interest in Huntsville and Talladega and Calhoun Counties. In majority-minority Jefferson County, where Birmingham is located, the state legislative maps also allow a collective nine districts, all majority white, to cross county lines to change the makeup of the county’s legislative delegation and dilute the power of voters of color.

Alabama’s tactics this cycle are not new. The state carries a sordid record of using racial discrimination to maintain the power its white citizens. While Alabama has made important changes over the past 50 years — most of them in response to court orders or intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice — it has not learned its lesson when it comes to drawing fair and constitutional districts. Even after a three-judge court struck down 12 state legislative districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders in the 2010 redistricting cycle, Alabama’s tactics persist.

One reason may be that until 2013, Alabama was covered by a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required either the DOJ or a federal court to approve any changes in voting practices, including legislative districts. But the Supreme Court struck down the formula that covered Alabama in 2013 in a case brought by an Alabama county — Shelby County. Lawsuits like this one are necessary to fill that void and prevent the use of discriminatory maps.

Alabamians were kept in the dark throughout a secretive map drawing process, and at the eleventh hour, they were presented with maps that revealed that race was a predominant factor in determining those district lines. The new maps reflect Alabama’s longstanding efforts to use race as means to maintain power through the packing and cracking of Black voters in certain districts, while paying lip service to fair districting by inconsequentially unpacking Black voters in others.

All the people of Alabama, no matter their race, deserve fair state legislative and congressional districts. Redistricting affects representation, and representation affects everything else, from our schools to our health care to our criminal justice system. Alabama’s electoral maps fail to meet the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the laws to citizens of all races, and fail the test of fundamental fairness as well. Alabamians deserve better.