AI for Abolition? A Participatory Design Approach

Abstract: The abolitionist community faces challenges from both the carceral state and oppressive technologies which, by empowering the ruling class who have the resources to develop AI, serve to entrench societal inequities even more deeply. This paper presents a case study in participatory design with transformative and restorative justice practitioners with the goal of designing an AI system to support their work. By co-designing an evaluation framework for LLMs with the practitioners, we hope to push back against the exclusionary status quo of AI and extent AI's potentiality to a historically marginalized community.