Sheriff Ed Gonzalez
Artificial intelligence could soon be used to monitor inmates at the Harris County Jail.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office recently invited companies to submit proposals for an AI-powered camera system capable of analyzing inmates’ behavior and detecting weapons and other contraband. While the sheriff’s office has not yet chosen a vendor, it’s the first step toward bringing the technology into the jail and follows a wider pattern of AI implementation across county government.
The jail is a multi-building facility in downtown Houston along the banks of Buffalo Bayou. Its location, and the complexity of its layout, make it difficult for staff to monitor the thousands of inmates who enter and exit each day, said Jason Spencer, a senior policy advisor to Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.
“There are lots of blind spots and little nooks and crannies throughout the jail,” Spencer said. “So it’s a challenge keeping eyes on every square foot of that building. I don’t know that this kind of technology would fix that entirely, but it seems like it has the potential to help.”
Spencer compared what the sheriff’s office is looking for to similar technologies already in use at stadiums and by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. The hope, he said, is that the same technology can be adapted for use in a jail setting.
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Beryl Lipton is a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties from digital overreach. The technology might have potential, Lipton said, but she said jails and prison facilities have consistently failed to implement emerging technology in a way that benefits both the inmates and the officers tasked with guarding them.
“Unfortunately you see these crazy cases where the moment (an inmate) needs the footage, all of a sudden it’s gone, or the cameras weren’t recording, or the footage got corrupted,” Lipton said.
Lipton said government agencies also have broadly struggled to deploy AI-powered technology with accompanying safeguards that ensure the data they collect and process remains secure.
Spencer said officials don’t know how much the AI project would cost or how long it would take to deploy. As companies pitch their capabilities, Spencer said the sheriff’s office learns the technology’s potential and the associated price tag.
They’re in the early stages of this process, so we don’t have a lot of information yet. It’s fine to look at this sort of thing, the jail setting makes it a pretty good use case given the limited space, lesser concern for privacy, and greater need for surveillance. That doesn’t mean there are current products that will do what they need at a reasonable price, but it’s worth checking out. I hope they have a long list of questions to ask the vendors about things like their security posture, data retention policies (I assume the data will be kept on vendor-owned cloud servers), who will have access to the data and under what conditions, how to get out of the contract, and so on. I’ll be interested to see what if anything comes of this.