Today, religious liberty issues are more complicated than simply freedom from government interference in religious worship or teaching. Threats to religious liberty and respect for conscience are emerging in the health care field, in the area of institutional religious freedom, and in the context of issues involving same-sex marriage and nondiscrimination policies. Religious liberty and respect for conscience should be encouraged and protected, both in civil society and in law and policy, as an effective and principled way to promote social peace and civic fraternity in an increasingly pluralistic society.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of “Crime and Punishment”, once wrote, “The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” Updated for the 21st century, our “degree of civilisation” might be revealed by the technology used inside them.
For Microsoft, prisons represent a market. In recent years, the company and its business partners have started providing an array of surveillance and Big Data analytics solutions to prisons, courts and community supervision programmes.
This comes against a backdrop of global protests against police violence along with calls to defund the police and address institutional racism at every level of the criminal justice system.