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Virginia Eubanks Biography

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“Poverty in America is actively denied by the way we define it: as falling below an arbitrary income line at a single moment in time. The official poverty line makes poverty looks like a regrettable anomaly that can be explained away by poor decisions, individual behavior, and cultural pathology. In fact, poverty is an often-temporary state experienced cyclically by a huge number of people from wildly different backgrounds displaying a nearly infinite range of behaviors.”

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“The digital poorhouse is eternal. Data in the digital poorhouse will last a very, very long time. Obsolescence was built in to the age of paper records, because their physicality created constraints on their storage. The digital poorhouse promises, instead, an eternal record. Past decisions that hurt others should have consequences. But being followed for life by a mental health diagnosis, an accusation of child neglect, or a criminal record diminishes life chances, limits autonomy, and damages self-determination. Additionally, retaining public service data ad infinitum intensifies the risk of inappropriate disclosure and data breaches. The eternal record is punishment and retribution, not justice.”

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“When poor and working people in the United States become a politically viable force, relief institutions and their technologies of control shift to better facilitate cultural denial and to rationalize a brutal return to subserviency. Relief institutions are machines for undermining the collective power of poor and working-class people, and for producing in difference in everyone else.”

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“[Denial] contorts our physical geography, as we build infrastructure—suburbs, highways, private schools, and prisons—that allow the professional middle-class to actively avoid sharing the lives of poor and working-class people.”

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“Classification and criminalization work by including poor and working-class people in systems that limit their rights and deny their basic human needs. The digital poorhouse doesn’t just exclude, it sweeps millions of people into a system of control that compromises their humanity and their self determination.”

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“The integration of policing and homeless services blurs the boundary between the maintenance of economic security and the investigation of crime, between poverty and criminality, tightening a net of constraint that tracks and traps the unhoused.”

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