Fifty years ago, as the U.S. began building the world’s largest infrastructure for human caging, many Americans envisioned a future without prisons. Prisons, in the eyes of many, were irrevocably broken and incompatible with democracy. A committee convened by Lyndon B. Johnson to study law enforcement wrote that “life in many institutions is at best barren and futile, and at worst unspeakably brutal and degrading” and lamented that many prisoners labored “under conditions scarcely distinguishable from slavery.”

In 1970, a group of judges spent a single night at Nevada State Prison, and emerged to share their experience of “men raving, screaming and pounding on the walls.” A Kansas judge said, “I felt like an animal in a cage” and urged the state to “send two bulldozers out there and tear the damn thing to the ground.” A federal judge in Arkansas said imprisonment in that state amounted to “banishment from civilized society to a dark and evil world.” A judge in Wisconsin predicted that “the institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational.”

Mainstream outlets such as Time magazine and The New York Times Magazine asked whether prisons should be abolished. As a mass movement for deinstitutionalization forced mental asylums — the nation’s other and, at the time, even larger institution for involuntary confinement — to go to ruin, it seemed that prisons might crumble, too.

Of course, instead of disappearing, prisons expanded over the next 40 years to become defining features of American life. Not only did U.S. criminal legal systems grow large enough to confine 2.4 million people and surveil one in 31 American adults, their logics of punishment and control came to define and permeate other realms of politics.

Why did prison systems metastasize so devastatingly when they seemed so vulnerable? And what can we take from this history as a massive social movement again challenges the legitimacy of U.S. criminal legal systems?

Part of the blame, as I lay out in a recent article in The Journal of American History, lies with so-called “alternatives to incarceration,” which the public and policymakers — especially liberals — embraced with zeal. And no alternative to prison was more ubiquitous and insidious than the correctional halfway house.

Though they had humble religious origins — Episcopal, Catholic, and Quaker groups opened the first halfway houses in the 1950s in order to help people reenter society — halfway houses caught the imagination of many policymakers in the 1960s and 1970s. They offered a model of “community treatment” that promised to address crime, drug addiction, and other social ills more effectively, cheaply, and humanely than traditional prisons.

Enthusiasm for community treatment brought millions of dollars in government funding for halfway houses. Funding poured in through President Johnson’s Great Society programs, and millions more would come through the Law Enforcement Assistance Act and the Nixon administration’s wars on drugs and crime. Halfway houses numbered only around a dozen in 1960, but by the late 1970s, they were more common in the U.S. than roller skating rinks. The capacity of the nation’s 2,000-plus halfway houses totaled more than 65,000 beds — roughly the contemporaneous prison capacities of California, Texas, and New York combined.

The major appeal of community treatment — then as now — was that it seemed not just an alternative to the prison, but even its opposite. The Johnson administration’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice touted halfway houses as an “entirely new kind of correctional institution” that would be “architecturally and methodologically the antithesis of the traditional fortress-like prison.” In some ways, halfway houses did look like opposites to prison. They were small (generally around 20 beds), located in urban areas rather than far from them, and for a time elided the power dynamics characteristic of prisons. Residents, for instance, usually wore their own clothes rather than uniforms, and the earliest halfway houses were organized around discourses of “family.”

These superficial qualities, however, belied the structural similarities between halfway houses and traditional prisons. Like prisoners, the 65,000 people in halfway houses were involuntarily confined. They were subject to systematic surveillance. Their movements were tightly controlled. And they were forced to labor for others’ benefit. Indeed, one reason for the proliferation of halfway houses was their ability to appeal to reformers and prison administrators at the same time. They departed from what were seen as prisons’ most objectionable characteristics while maintaining systems for surveillance and control.

Just how closely halfway houses resembled traditional prisons changed over time with modifications in how they were funded and administered, but even the least coercive halfway houses suffered from their proximity to the rest of the criminal legal system. Despite the promise that they would be an alternative to prison, community treatment initiatives tended to expand the reach of the carceral state.

Not only did they dramatically expand the capacity of states to confine people against their will, their promise of “treatment” encouraged judges, prosecutors, and other policymakers to apply these interventions to groups of people who had not been in the system before. To give just one example, after the Texas Youth Commission embraced the halfway house model in the 1970s, it began to incarcerate hundreds more children each year in community-based facilities, including “pre-delinquent” children who had not committed a crime.

Today’s discontent with prisons and policing closely resembles that of half a century ago. Many of the solutions being proposed are also near carbon copies. Community-based alternatives, rehabilitation, education, drug treatment, and mental health interventions were all part of the appeal of halfway houses. New technologies for face recognition, location monitoring, online surveillance, and electronic forms of identification threaten to make the next iteration of “alternatives” even more harmful.

As we work to combat mass incarceration and create what comes next, it will be important not to be fooled by superficial differences or by changes in rhetoric. Ending mass incarceration will require dismantling — not replicating, reproducing, or relocating — systems for involuntary confinement, surveillance, and control.

Proponents of expanding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) often point to its potential to stimulate economic growth — increased productivity at lower costs, a higher GDP per capita, and job creation have all been touted as possible benefits. The promise of an economic boost via machine learning is understandably seductive, and private and government actors are now regularly using AI in key areas of economic opportunity, including education, housing, employment, and credit, to name just a few. But as AI adoption is cast as a smart economic investment in the future, it’s important to pause and ask: Whose futures and whose wallets are we talking about?

There is ample evidence of the discriminatory harm that AI tools can cause to already marginalized groups. After all, AI is built by humans and deployed in systems and institutions that have been marked by entrenched discrimination — from the criminal legal system, to housing, to the workplace, to our financial systems. Bias is often baked into the outcomes the AI is asked to predict. Likewise, bias is in the data used to train the AI — data that is often discriminatory or unrepresentative for people of color, women, or other marginalized groups — and can rear its head throughout the AI’s design, development, implementation, and use. The tech industry’s lack of representation of people who understand and can work to address the potential harms of these technologies only exacerbates this problem.

There are numerous examples of the harms that AI can have. AI tools have perpetuated housing discrimination, such as in tenant selection and mortgage qualifications, as well as hiring and financial lending discrimination.

For example, AI systems used to evaluate potential tenants rely on court records and other datasets that have their own built-in biases that reflect systemic racism, sexism, and ableism, and are notoriously full of errors. People are regularly denied housing, despite their ability to pay rent, because tenant screening algorithms deem them ineligible or unworthy.

These algorithms use data such as eviction and criminal histories, which reflect long standing racial disparities in housing and the criminal legal system that are discriminatory towards marginalized communities. People of color seeking loans to purchase homes or refinance have been overcharged by millions thanks to AI tools used by lenders. And many employers now use AI-driven tools to interview and screen job seekers, many of which pose enormous risks for discrimination against people with disabilities and other protected groups. Rather than help eliminate discriminatory practices, AI has worsened them — hampering the economic security of marginalized groups that have long dealt with systemic discrimination.

That’s why today, the ACLU, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Upturn, and two dozen partner organizations are calling on the Biden administration to take concrete steps to bring civil rights and equity to the forefront of its AI and technology policies, and to actively work to address the systemic harms of these technologies. Just two weeks ago, many of the same groups also joined together in an in-depth response to a request for information by federal financial agencies on the use of AI, raising many of the same concerns. Many groups have also offered concrete policy recommendations to federal agencies on addressing technology’s role in discrimination in the domains of hiring, housing, and financial services.

Thus far, federal agencies that regulate industries using AI have not taken the steps necessary to ensure that AI systems are accountable to the people they impact or that they comply with civil rights laws. Federal legislative and regulatory efforts have not yet methodically undertaken the task of ensuring our civil rights laws protect vulnerable people from the harms exacerbated by today’s technologies. In fact, while the Biden administration has made an overarching commitment to center racial equity throughout federal policymaking, the administration’s emerging AI and technology priorities have lacked the necessary focus on equity for people of color and others who have been subject to discrimination and bias. The administration to date has overlooked necessary civil rights and civil liberties perspectives as AI and technology policies are being developed, which risks further perpetuating systemic racism and economic inequality.

The bottom line is that the administration and federal agencies must prioritize and address all the ways that AI and technology can exacerbate racial and other inequities and ensure that its policies and enforcement activities lead to more equitable outcomes. Decades of discrimination have left people of color and Black people in particular, women, and other marginalized groups at an economic disadvantage in the U.S. The Biden administration must work to reverse the trends that continue to this day, which must necessarily include an emphasis on how modern digital technologies perpetuate inequity. The economic and racial divide in our country will only deepen if the administration fails to do so.