If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. California spent 2025 telling the public that no state agency relied on high-risk automated systems to decide anything about people’s lives. That claim collapsed this month, when the state’s Department of Technology acknowledged six such systems already running, including one that predicts whether incarcerated people will commit crimes after they get out. The reversal arrived in a legislative report the state is required to produce every year under a 2023 law. That law, pushed by civil rights, privacy, and civil liberties groups, forces agencies to disclose any “high-risk automated decision system,” which it defines as one “used to assist or replace human discretionary decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect, including decisions that materially impact access to, or approval for, housing or accommodations, education, employment, credit, health care, and criminal justice.” A year ago, the answer California gave to that same requirement was zero. The system drawing the most attention reads like something lifted from Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation runs a tool called the California Static Risk Assessment, or CSRA, to scoop up data and score people behind bars on their odds of being arrested again. We obtained a copy of the report for you here. According to the report, it “produces a risk number value that will predict the likelihood that an offender will incur a felony arrest within a three-year period after release to parole. Risk factors utilized include, but are not limited to, age, gender, criminal misdemeanor and felony convictions, and sentence/supervision violations.” What the CSRA does is build a profile from fixed personal data and compress it into a single number. The report describes the system analyzing “static” factors, including age, gender and criminal history, to “assign a risk level from 1 (Low) to 5 (High Risk Violence).” Two of those inputs, age and gender, are traits a person never chose and cannot alter. The state feeds them into an algorithm and lets the output shape decisions about supervision and freedom. California frames the scoring as good housekeeping. “By identifying high-risk individuals, the CDCR can focus its limited rehabilitation resources where they are needed most to have the maximum positive impact on public safety,” the report suggests. The framing skips past who absorbs the cost when the number gets a person wrong, which is the person assigned the higher score. The department also concedes the work does not require automation at all. Staff could “manually perform the CSRA evaluation” themselves, the report notes, which makes the algorithm a convenience the state reached for rather than a capability it lacked. The state chose the version that turns human judgment into a profiling pipeline. The prison algorithm sits inside a wider pattern of automation the state never volunteered. California also runs systems that decide whether unemployment claims look fraudulent, remotely watch California State University students during exams, and more. On its own, a parole risk score is not the most alarming surveillance story of the year. A human officer reading the same rap sheet would reach for similar conclusions and the tool predates most of the current AI panic. The trend underneath it is the real story. Governments want to profile people and automate the judgments that follow and that appetite runs on data. You cannot score someone without first gathering enough about them to feed the model and the more decisions get handed to an algorithm, the more of a person’s life has to be logged and kept on file to justify the output. California going from zero disclosed systems to six is not a scandal, but what’s interesting is how ordinary that growth has become. Whatever guardrails might have followed are not coming soon. Senate Bill 1248, which would have barred state employees from using automated decision systems as the sole basis for a decision, died last month in the legislature’s fast-moving appropriations process. Nothing in California law currently stops an automated score from being the deciding factor in how the state treats a person. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The Algorithm California Said Didn’t Exist appeared first on Reclaim The Net.