"Prisons launch 'absurd' attempt to detect coronavirus in inmate phone calls," 21 April 2020

Jail and prison officials in at least three states are using software to scan inmate calls for mentions of the coronavirus, a move advocacy groups believe paves the way for abuse while raising stark questions about carceral health care. The monitoring software [Verus] was created by LEO Technologies... “It automatically downloads, analyzes, and transcribes all recorded inmate calls, proactively flagging them for review,” explains a Verus product brochure, which also claims this “near real-time intelligence” can be used to identify sick inmates, help allocate personnel in understaffed prisons, and even prevent “COVID-19 related murder.”

... Shilpi Agarwal, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California... [said] “it’s not at all clear that any of the monitoring and analysis would be accurate,” as “we know voice recognition technology is deeply biased. Moreover, we also know that this kind of recording technology has been misused in the past to financially exploit inmates and to spy on their conversations with attorneys.”... Advocates for incarcerated people said they feared the technology would be used against those discussing the virus with people outside... Because the Verus system works with a prison facility’s current phone system, the possibility that privileged communications will also be transcribed is troubling. Moreover, the use of Verus adds in at least two more layers of access to inmate calls — by LEO Technologies and by Amazon — in turn increasing access to potentially private communications... And as with any AI-powered surveillance tool, there are crucial questions about Verus’s accuracy, fairness, and accountability.