When the sheriff in Suffolk County, New York, requested $700,000 from the U.S. government for an artificial intelligence system to eavesdrop on prison phone conversations, his office called it a key tool in fighting gang-related and violent crime. But the county jail ended up listening to calls involving a much wider range of subjects -- scanning as many as 600,000 minutes per month, according to public records from the county obtained by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Beginning in 2019, Suffolk County was an early pilot site for the Verus AI-scanning system sold by California-based LEO Technologies, which uses Amazon speech-to-text technology to transcribe phone calls flagged by keyword searches. The company and law enforcement officials say it is a crucial tool to keep prisons and jails safe, and to fight crime, but critics say such systems trample the privacy rights of prisoners and other people, like family members, on the outside. "T he ability to surveil and listen at scale in this rapid way -- it is incredibly scary and chilling," said Julie Mao, deputy director at Just Futures Law, an immigration legal group.

Prisoners across the US could soon be subjected to a high-risk application of automated surveillance. A congressional committee is pressing the Department of Justice to explore the federal use of AI to analyze inmate's phone calls. The panel has called for further research into the tech's potential to prevent suicide and violent crime, Reuters reports. Attend the tech festival of the year and get your super early bird ticket now! The system transcribes phone conversations, analyzes the tone of voice, and detects certain words or phrases that are pre-programmed by officials.

A US prison was recently able to detect and prevent inmates from carrying out illegal business by using artificial intelligence to analyse calls made into and out of the prison for unusual patterns. All calls that connect on prison phone lines in the US are recorded and monitored, but it is a very time-consuming and boring job to listen endlessly to thousands of hours of conversations between inmates and their families in order to try to work out if anything nefarious is going on. To speed the job up, one prison in the American mid-west is using a machine learning system designed by London-based firm Intelligent Voice to listen to all the audio files and detect odd patterns for humans to take a closer look at, according to New Scientist. When the prison wardens looked at the analysis report created by the software, they discovered that one of the most popular non-trivial phrases being used by inmates was the phrase "three way". Initially the wardens thought that the phrase was some sort of sexual reference, but because the word was used so often in phone calls they investigated further, and realised that the phrase was actually a secret code word.