AI-Development in Austrian’s Prisons

With advances in technological development and the promises of efficiency, accuracy and traceability – especially through artificial intelligence (AI) - the public sector has started to make institutional adjustments. As a highly heterogeneous sector, with long-standing processes and practices vary depending on the area of operation, the development and implementation of new technologies should take this complexity into account. In this complex field, the various institutions and stakeholders all have the aim to include their logics, ways of thinking, and organizational practices into the processes of the technology. Taking the empirical example of the development of technology-based workflows for Austrian prisons, we examine how the different logics of stakeholder groups are included or excluded during the development process, how these are justified, and how these inclusionary and exclusionary practices influence the functionality of the system.

These findings are based on the experiences of two interdisciplinary projects in the specific prison context. Empirical results based on a situational map show how the various stakeholder groups (did not) participate in the development process of an application for prisoner room screenings and how they defined socially relevant problems for technical solutions. Their perspectives and images are presented in relation to the follow-up project, in which an AI-supported digital assistant for prison officers is being researched and developed.

Taking these perspectives into account, we want to address how a logic of impact-oriented resource management, which dominates the development of the technological tools, is negotiated throughout the process, and how other logics, such as user-friendliness, flexibility of work-flows, as well as the possibility of a non-use, compete throughout the development process. Finally, we will discuss the impact of these competing logics on the use of the finalized systems in the specific prison context and what this may mean for technology development in other areas.