Below are several examples of abstracts submitted to PLSC and accepted by the PPC. We provide them here to give everyone a taste of what constitutes a good abstract. Note that these samples may not be perfect, but we believe they can be instructive as you build your own submission.
Abstract 1
Sit in any criminal courtroom in the country today and the same scene unfolds multiple times: a person on probation or pretrial release faces reincarceration for a failed drug test, a positive alert on an alcohol detection device, or not charging their GPS ankle monitor. While the now ubiquitous use of surveillance technology in police investigations and trials continues to vex scholars and advocates alike, significantly less attention is paid to the increased reliance on sophisticated technology in the revocation setting in particular—even though almost half of all prison and jail admissions stem from violations of pretrial release, probation, or parole conditions. For the four million people on community supervision (including pretrial release, probation, and parole), invasive person-specific surveillance technology—including GPS tracking, cell phone surveillance, and blood alcohol monitoring—detects easily provable technical violations that facilitate a true “trial by machine” unprecedented in the legal system.
It is no surprise that sophisticated surveillance technologies are increasingly popular in the context of court supervision. These tools are heralded as reliable, more humane, and cheaper than incarceration (and they often are) and respond to the perception that more surveillance correlates with greater public safety. As the use of this technology skyrockets, so too have new state laws mandating their use in certain categories of cases and imposing mandatory arrest or detention for violations.
Yet because surveillance technology and court supervision are often studied in isolation, obscured from view is the increasingly mechanized definition, detection, proof, and adjudication of court supervision violations. Commentary on policing and technology tends not to focus on the unique attributes of court supervision, and likewise, much of probation and parole scholarship does not address the technological transformation of court supervision. This Article brings these two strands of scholarship together to specifically examine how technology facilitates reincarceration.
Drawing on recent statutory reforms, case law, and an original set of public records related to technology used in the context of court supervision, this Article identifies a symbiotic relationship between four factors: (1) the availability and capability of these technologies, (2) the hyper-technical nature of the release conditions they enforce, (3) the increasing lack of judicial discretion and oversight, and (4) the absence of procedural and substantive rights afforded to individuals facing revocation.
Viewed collectively, these factors reveal that people on community supervision are the proverbial miner’s canary for automated adjudications that are simultaneously more technically advanced and less constrained. Their experience reveals what happens when the government has seemingly perfect machine-generated proof to justify incarceration in settings with little adversarial scrutiny and few individual rights. In particular, Fourth Amendment protections, rules of evidence, trial rights, and higher burdens of proof provide guardrails and friction – even if imperfect – that prevent the complete realization of a trial by machine. No such friction or guardrails exist in the supervision context. Instead, sophisticated surveillance technology combined with the absence of rights and protections incentivizes a legal “back door” to incarceration. This back door allows police, prosecutors, and judges to avoid procedural checks and thorny constitutional questions, and the surveillance tools themselves escape any meaningful scrutiny.
This technologically facilitated back door to incarceration is not limited to community supervision and exists in other contexts where people’s rights are limited, such as prisons and the immigration system. In all these settings, the government may more easily detain, incarcerate, or deport precisely because surveillance technology provides near-perfect proof of rule violations and there are few mechanisms to challenge the government’s actions.
These dynamics carry significant implications. To begin, increased demand fuels private-sector innovation largely unconstrained by legal regimes that might otherwise limit the design or deployment of surveillance tools. As a result, community supervision, prisons, and the immigration system are increasingly fertile testing grounds for especially invasive surveillance technologies that would be unconstitutional if used on the public at large. At the same time, because these tools are perceived as effective and humane alternatives to detention, the subordinating effect on marginalized groups is sanitized and obscured. Yet, these tools ultimately reinforce the precise racial, citizenship status, and economic inequities that often inspire reform efforts in the first place.
Sample Abstract 2
Tech workers’ evolving discomfort with the political actions and alignments of industry — part of a prolonged and evolving ‘techlash’ (Wheeler 2023) — has led to new action. Some workers are choosing to engage in social and labor activism in their workplaces (Charitsis & Laamenen 2022; Boag et al. 2022; Tan et al. 2024; Schubiner & Dharmaraj 2024), while others opt to leave the private sector entirely in favor of work which more explicitly signals support of the public interest (Rider 2022; Chambers forthcoming). As this latter category of tech talent pivots, they seek out roles newly described as ‘public interest technology’, and they grapple with questions of funders’ influence. In the U.S., the public interest technology organizations that such tech workers aim to join are often based in the civil society sector, which occupies an important and complex role in relation to both the government and the private sector (Dvoskin 2022; Waldman 2024). However, these organizations are frequently funded by the very same Big Tech companies from which they intended to distance themselves (Goldenfein & Mann 2023) or by philanthropies whose influence, from an outsider’s perspective, is unclear. Furthermore, while more and more organizations begin to operate under the banner of public interest technology — a field that itself emerges from philanthropic spending — still many more create and use technology in the public interest outside this circumscribed circle, as organizations funded by alternative models. For example, scholars and community leaders have identified modern initiatives such as the Spanish workers’ cooperative Mondragón (Wright 2010), the San Diego taxi union (Irani et al. 2021), and public data trusts (Chan et al. 2023) which demonstrate socioeconomic organizational structures that aim to reject typical corporate and philanthropic forms and extractivism. Of course, the choices an organization makes regarding its funding sources have profound consequences for organizational remits, goals, incentives, networks, methods, and more (INCITE! 2017).
This study seeks to illuminate the funding landscape of public interest technology work across U.S. civil society in both mainstream and alternative funding models. Inspired by empirical work investigating funding of public interest law organizations (Albiston & Nielsen 2014), we will employ a mixed methodology that combines analysis of public financial documents and data, interviews with tech experts in civil society, and systematic analysis of existing sociotechnical research exploring a diversity of financial models in civic and public interest tech. The goals of this study are twofold. First, we will provide descriptive insight into funding arrangements, strategies, and networks—both those which are commonly adopted and those presented as non-normative alternatives by public interest technology organizations. Second, we will provide analytic insight identifying patterns, traps, and norms that result from such funding structures and arrangements.
In doing so, our contributions to PLSC and the broader research community will be as follows: (1) We will build upon the nascent body of research investigating the adoption of technologies and technologists within civil society and nonprofit organizations, as well as the ways such groups shape sociotechnical processes of policy-making, governance, social reproduction, and community-building (e.g., Voida et al. 2011; Erete et al. 2016; Bopp & Voida 2022; Darian et al. 2023a; Darian et al. 2023b; Lin et al. 2024). (2) In two ways, we will provide insights for trailblazing tech workers and civil society leaders who are navigating the public interest tech landscape. First, we will offer empirical evidence of the realities of civil society technology funding in order to inform strategic decision-making. Second, we seek to describe the opportunities and implications of alternative funding structures, which nonprofits might take into consideration as they evaluate the effects of funding on their own practices and goals. Rigorously surveying the flow of finances across public interest technology, as we aim to do in this work, is an important first step for both sociotechnical researchers and for advocates who seek to understand evolving roles for technology in modern social change-making.
Sample Abstract 3
Every state in the country has a system through which state authorities identify and intervene in families seen as posing a risk of abuse or neglect to their children. The reach of this system is broad and deep, touching millions of families each year inequitably along racial, socioeconomic, and ableist lines. (e.g., Edwards et al. 2021; Rebbe et al. 2021; Powell 2022, Lorr 2024). Impacted families, advocates, and scholars have joined in a growing chorus in recent years, demonstrating how this system—which many now refer to as the “family policing” system—undermines families and communities as opposed to supporting them. (e.g., Roberts 2001; Roberts 2022; Copeland 2022; Trivedi 2024). Rather than being primarily concerned with the welfare of children, it often acts as a system of surveillance and social control, deputizing the country’s safety net to act as watchers, reporters, and investigators. (e.g. Baumann et al. 2021; Bach et al. 2025).
In recent years and especially since the fall of Roe, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the ways authorities across the country seek to surveil and punish individuals’ access to politicized health care like abortion and miscarriage treatment. (e.g. Huq & Wexler 2023; cf. Goodwin 2020; Roberts 1991). Studies, like the multi-year research study conducted by Pregnancy Justice in partnership with Professors Wendy A. Bach and Madalyn Wasilczuk, have looked at the prevalence of information about such care being used by the criminal policing system, to pursue criminal charges. (see also Huss et al. 2023). These studies tend to identify the family policing system as a conduit of information to the criminal policing system. But focusing only on the coercive effect of the criminal policing system, and viewing the family policing system as merely a conduit of information, misses a major mechanism of state power.
This paper argues that the family policing system itself works as a mechanism of surveillance and social control, deputizing medical actors not just to report but also to actively gather information, and wielding the powers of surveillance, investigation, and family separation as mechanisms to dissuade politically disfavored reproductive behavior, punish resistance, and coerce conformity.
The data supporting this paper is the result of an ongoing research project. The research team has conducted dozens of interviews (and continues to do so) with professionals working in and around, and individuals impacted by, the family policing system. The interviews are geared toward understanding three interrelated research questions: (1) Has evidence of and/or information about a person’s pregnancy outcomes (i.e. pregnancy loss, miscarriage), access to abortion care, and/or access to gender-affirming care been weaponized against parents in CPS investigations and cases? If so, where, how, and how often? (2) How do family policing authorities receive information about individuals’ stigmatized health care? What technologies, if any, are involved? And (3) Does the political leaning of the community affect how family policing authorities receive or use information about people’s stigmatized health care?
Preliminary findings include: (a) In more than one instance, medical system personnel activated the family policing system to investigate individuals who had received (legal) abortion care. (b) Parents of teenagers have found themselves subjected to investigations stemming from allegations relating to the young people’s attempts (or alleged attempts) to seek abortion care. (c) Young people in foster care experience less information control and more barriers to accessing reproductive care. (d) Mandated reporters such as medical providers not only watch for child maltreatment but also act as active investigators, asking questions and documenting information they would not otherwise gather as part of their treatment, at the behest of the family policing system. (e) The political valence of the surrounding community seems to matter, but the story is complex. For example, in “blue” states where the stigmatized medical care that is the subject of this study is legal and even championed, families subjected to family policing are often judged for their choices. Abortion and pregnancy loss is often used as a form of “character evidence” against them in investigations and proceedings. And in some “red” states where care is being criminalized, advocates at times see CPS as an ally in the fight against further criminalization of their communities.
Sample Abstract 4
In summer 2025, EPA scientists were tasked to determine whether wastewater monitoring tools could detect mifepristone—the first drug in the two-drug regimen commonly used to terminate pregnancy (Kitchener & Davenport, 2025). This was only the most recent in a series of events over the last year to impact the future direction and uses of wastewater monitoring. Alongside increasingly draconian abortion regulation and criminalization, these moves risk coopting an important public health tool and further eroding trust in government.
Wastewater monitoring involves detecting and measuring chemical or biological signals in sewage samples collected from a sewer system or a wastewater treatment facility. These programs grew dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic, when researchers established that it could detect a rise in Covid-19 viral RNA on a population-wide basis ahead of individual nasal testing or hospitalizations (Gable, Ram & Ram, 2020). Since 2020, governments across the United States and around the world have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build wastewater monitoring infrastructure and human capital (Ram, Gable & Ram, 2022).
Even before these programs and their monitoring infrastructure were in place, public health authorities were already interested in using these systems beyond Covid-19. That interest came, in part, from increasing understanding that wastewater monitoring could facilitate more proactive public health surveillance, as in the case of polio virus (Matthews & Stobbe, 2022). But there was also pressure to ensure the ongoing relevance of these programs. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, some scholars have observed that “political considerations may drive wastewater surveillance programs to justify their existence in other ways, including by monitoring for other substances or for other purposes” (Ram, Gable & Ram, 2022). From the start, these authors called for greater ethical and legal engagement with wastewater monitoring—and for regulating this technology and its infrastructure to guard against its repurposing for uses inconsistent with “individual privacy, autonomy, liberty, or bodily integrity” (Ram, Gable & Ram, 2022; Gable, Ram & Ram, 2020).
Recent events have made that repurposing increasingly likely and in increasingly invasive ways. The Trump administration has sought to cut many federal grants, including some for wastewater monitoring (Shastri, 2026; Howard e al., 2025). At least a half dozen states have sought to turn wastewater monitoring into a tool for policing disfavored conduct, including abortion and gender affirming care (Me. H.P 573 (2025); Mont. S.B. 479 (2025); Tex. S.B. 1976 (2025); Wyo. H.B, 159 (2025); Wittenberg & Ollstein, 2025). And the federal government has sought to link wastewater monitoring to abortion detection and deterrence (Kitchener & Davenport, 2025). Taken together, these efforts mark a worrisome transformation in the use of wastewater monitoring from public health to government surveillance.
In a consensus report on wastewater monitoring for public health action, the National Academies identified “[t]hree closely linked” criteria for “evaluating potential targets” for future wastewater monitoring: the “public health significance of the threat,” “analytical feasibility” for wastewater monitoring, and the utility of wastewater monitoring “to inform public health action” (Nat’l Acads. Sci., Med. & Eng’g, 2023). Other scholars of wastewater ethics have emphasized similar guideposts (Ram, Gable & Ram, 2022). Yet wastewater monitoring for abortion pills fails each of these criteria.
Wastewater monitoring has largely gone unplumbed by legal scholars. Growing interest in wastewater monitoring for abortion pills, meanwhile, exemplifies how the systemic under regulation of wastewater monitoring writ large threatens both individual and communal privacy interests.
This Article fills that gap. Part I tracks the history and recent expansion of wastewater monitoring for public health. Part II, taking the still-ongoing mifepristone episode as a case study, describes state and federal efforts to turn this public health tool into one for surveillance and suppression. Part III turns to the ethics and legal regulation of wastewater monitoring, arguing that the case study of mifepristone reveals problematic under regulation that is inconsistent with public health criteria, void of necessary legal guardrails, inapposite to existing law, and mission creep in action. Part IV then zooms out, drawing on the case study to articulate a regulatory framework grounded in legislative and administrative oversight, transparency, and accountability, alongside durable funding reforms to prevent chronic under resourcing of wastewater monitoring programs.