Date: 04-11-2026
Biometric technologies are increasingly using facial expression, eye movement, voice patterns, and more to predict if some has committed a crime, or will commit a crime |
From Inquest
By Sarah Fathallah
Every few months, a harrowing story of biometric misidentification makes headlines. Last April, a Black man named Trevis Williams was wrongfully arrested by the NYPD after facial recognition technology misidentified him. The man they were looking for was eight inches shorter, seventy pounds lighter, and, unlike Williams, actually in the vicinity of the crime that day. Such stories highlight the dangers, identified by Simone Browne, of encoding the body as evidence—and policing it accordingly.
Last month, one such example came to light: an AI model, trained on years of prison phone calls, is being piloted to help detect “when crimes are being thought about or contemplated.” Beyond undermining the presumption of innocence, claims that biometric technology can foretell crime falls under the logic of “precrime,” a term coined by author Philip K. Dick in his 1956 novella The Minority Report. That this idea was born in science fiction is telling: it underscores both the speculative foundations of such biometric systems and the distinctly dystopian path their widespread adoption would chart.
In this article, I pull on my work as a surveillance and carceral technologies researcher to highlight just a few ways this reach is expanding. Law enforcement is using DNA to speculatively generate suspects’ faces; tracking eye movements to detect deception; analyzing voiceprints to flag “risky” individuals; and using electronic monitoring data to forecast reoffending. Altogether, these examples illustrate how technology can stretch the carceral system into the future, shaping who is watched, judged, and targeted before anything has even happened. Continue reading >>>
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