Since she began studying mechanical engineering as an undergraduate at Stanford University, Ufuoma Ovienmhada had little desire to build “tech for tech’s sake.” The university’s sustainability lab offered one route to the applied side of engineering that appealed to her. One summer, she worked with the lab’s researchers on a project in Ivory Coast, in West Africa, where she considered how engineering could be employed for sustainable development.

Undergirding Ovienmhada’s academic work was a burgeoning political consciousness shaped by the police murders of unarmed Black people. In her recollection, her college tenure, between 2014 and 2018, was “the Black Lives Matter era of police violence being broadcast on social media every other week.” She regularly attended protests and participated in Black campus organizations where she and her peers frequently discussed police brutality. While researching policing protocols at Stanford, Ovienmhada remembers being told by a campus officer that someone walking down the street in a hoodie would automatically be considered suspicious. “You’re telling me that racism is embedded in how you operate,” she remembers thinking.

Ovienmhada went on to enroll in a master’s program at the MIT Media Lab, where she studied the use of satellite imagery analysis to manage invasive species in the Republic of Benin. She was in school during yet another period of time punctuated by police murders — this time of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. The unprecedented nationwide protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020 encouraged Ovienmhada to pivot from international development work to the domestic issues of policing and mass incarceration. She wanted to figure out how she could apply her skills as an engineer and programmer to address the problems that concerned her most deeply. As young people across the country took to the streets to demand an end to racist and violent policing, Ovienmhada learned about the nascent field of prison ecology, which focuses on the environmental hazards within and around carceral facilities — prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers — and how they affect incarcerated people and surrounding communities.