Quote:Original post by Al Gorithm
Killers and rapists should still be behind bars, but those are the examples given in the article.

Many rapists do not receive life sentences and in the UK a life sentence does not necessarily mean the offender will spend the rest of their life in jail. Rapists and other sex offenders have a high likelihood of reoffending so it makes sense to track them, though as far as I know there are already systems in place to do that. Violent offenders are also often likely to reoffend so it makes some sense to track them as well.

I, for one, welcome our new Orwellian overlords! All your crime are belong to them, except for the ones Chuck Norris has committed!

I totally support keeping track of people who have already offended. It's just like probation, only... not.

But anything other than that is indeed frightening.

The part that bothers me is the idea of treating them as inevitable criminals. My childhood was one of abuse, neglect, abandonment, humiliation and degradation. I was certainly at high risk. I had a bunch of guys with baseball bats try to surround me while I was walking down some railroad tracks late one night. It was sorely tempting to just pull my gun and start shooting those stupid sobs. I took a bat away from one and backed the rest down as I knew full well I could. They didn't have the nerve to use those bats and I recognized that clearly. It wasn't some need for self-defense that tempted me to shoot them, but the idea that I might get by with it.

Say I had of decided to go ahead and start shooting. So in some Minority Report type scenerio the police rush in at the very last minute. What about all the crap that took me to that point in my life. What about the just not caring about dieing that had me on those tracks that night and many another nasty place other nights? What about all the nasty crap people had done to me that lead me to feel some people just deserve to die, preferably painful deaths, that put the gun in my pocket? What about all the hell I had been through prior to that night?

What is this? Some Star Trek episode with a guest appearance by the Prime Directive? We not only can't change the past, but we can't change the future either. We have no choice but to set by watching this nightmare unfold and only jump in at the last possible moment. What happened in the real world? I walked off down the tracks, off onto a street a block later and there sat a squad car with an officer writing a report in it. I thought, hey, I'll tell him about the dumb little sobs down the tracks so he can do something before they get themselves killed. He asks me if I can't see that he's busy filling out paperwork and tells me to shove off.

It's seems a joke that we're going to monitor people, create profiles and intervene to prevent crimes when we can't even be bothered to tell a bunch of dips with basebats to go home before they get hurt. I think it's a great idea to intervene with high risk individuals and try to stear them clear of a life of crime. We have many community groups that do exactly that. Whoever came up with this idea though seems to be a few clues short of a full load. It seems they would be better suited to watching rats in a maze than working in criminal justice.

I know it's a really difficult concept, but criminal justice isn't about punishing people for commiting crimes. It's about PREVENTING people from commiting crimes. You arrest and punish people to set an example for the community. Here is where the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior lies. What in the world does a program like this hope to accomplish? Maybe we should stick the psychologists in the prisons dealing with rehabilitation and the sociologists on the street dealing with criminal justice.

Quote:Original post by LilBudyWizer
I know it's a really difficult concept, but criminal justice isn't about punishing people for commiting crimes. It's about PREVENTING people from commiting crimes.

I hate to say it, but that's just an opinion.

Criminal justice can be a lot of things - punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, or even non-intervention.

Also, your argument in that quote is a nice argument for... actuarial justice and profiling (which I know isn't what you meant and I know why you say it).

Let me say that I do not think that actuarial justice (that is, the identification, categorization, and management of groups based on risk) is a good idea for the justice system to use in any widescale manner.

But you did ask what it hopes to accomplish. In Greenwood's words (Selective Incapacitation), "I can reduce robbery rates 15% and reduce the prison population by 5%." He suggests seven factors to predict offense rates (though these are not necessarily weighted equally):
1. Prior conviction for the instant offense type,
2. Incarceration more than 50% of preceding two years,
3. Conviction before age 16,
4. Served time in a juvenile facility,
5. Drug use in preceding two years,
6. Drug use as a juvenile,
7. Employed less than 50% of preceding two years.
And you know what? I think he could do it. Here are the results based on some RAND studies:

               Self-reported offense ratesPredicted      Low      Med      High     TotalScoreLow            14%      10%      3%       27%(0-1)Med            12%      22%      10%      44%(2-3)High           4%       10%      15%      29%(4-7)Total          30%      42%      28%      100%

The numbers going from top left to bottom right (excluding the total) are the fully 'correct' estimates (if you will, 51% of the model is absolutely correct) and the 3% and 4% numbers are the most disturbing indicators.

So, that said, actuarial justice is an accurate and measurable way to respond to risk of crime. It even allows us to prevent crime by incapacitating offenders who are likely to commit more crime. Our prison space, court time and taxpayer dollars can be efficiently spent to earn us the most 'good.'

But, as you point out, there are massive downsides. Such a system returns not only false negatives (it misses offenders it should catch), but more disturbingly, false positives (it catches innocents). As such, it almost guarantees (in fact, may be predicated on) the loss of civil liberties. Less importantly, it's a somewhat cynical system that assumes crime, ignores our capacity to make decisions and change our selves, and stuffs us into tiny, often incorrect and discrete categories.

Also, pieces of the justice system have become more risk-based over the years. As Feeley and Simon point out, preventive detention (bail, or remand of) has changed from a system of encouraging someone to show up to court to keeping the high-risk offenders off the streets (Supreme Court in Salerno). Selective incapacitation is becoming a grand idea in several states around the US, and false positives and negatives abound (though perhaps with a good effect on crime rates). The spread of cheap and easy-to-use technology is conducive to more tools for computing this stuff (and thus appearing to be more scientifically accurate and less biased) at all levels. Drug courier profiles as used by the DEA (Supreme Court case in Sokolow) do not require any probable cause (reasonable suspicion that a particular person committed a particular crime, in this case) is certainly based on actuarial ideas (although the factors were not based on any actual data, but simply ideas that intuitively imply risk for drug trafficking: for example, city of departure, type of luggage, order of departure from plane, nervousness, length of stay, paying with cash, mismatched names). The willingness of the courts to explicitly allow and encourage these systems is a little worrisome.

Although personally, I'm fine with risk-based systems in decisions to grant parole.

So... is that a decent response? In short, I'm giving some sort of additional evidence to support and generalize your experience to the system at large. I'm also pointing out why some of your arguments are a little flawed even if your end argument is, in my mind, completely accurate (before some other asshole does it rudely and without any real information).

[devils-advocate]
Presumably nobody posting in this thread has a problem with the idea of "sex offenders registers". What's the difference? As far as I can tell, judging from the original Times article, the purposes of both seem to be identical. It also seems to me that the database is only a mechanised version of what Police departments all over the world do when trying to create a theory of a crime, anyway. Does anybody here really think that people with a history of domestic violence aren't looked at with more suspicion when a murder is committed?
[/devils-advocate]

Having said that, this seems deeply unsettling, but I cannot explain exactly why. It will be interesting to see what happens when the use of the system is challenged in the courts.

There is a huge difference between a sex offender's likelihood to become a repeat offender and a mentally disturbed person's likelihood to become a first-time offender. For one, we have fairly precise statistics on how many first-time sex offenders become repeat offenders, we have no clue how many mentally disturbed people even exist to determine if it really is a contributing factor to crime. Correlation does not suggest causation; a disproportionate number of criminals having mental instability issues could suggest that the population as a whole has mental instability issues just as much as it suggests that unstable people become criminals.

We have so very few universally recognized freedoms and rights. Freedom of expression is one, without it we pretty much accept that the country is on the despotic side of the spectrum (see: French ban on religious clothing in schools, Free Speech Zones in America, banning of anti-homosexuality sermons in Sweden). The right to justice is another: equal protection under the law and the right of Habeas Corpus (I'm probably missing more, but these are the ones that are pertinent to my argument). This violates equal protection because it places a specific sub-population under special scrutiny. This threatens to violate Habeas Corpus as it mentions the possibility of preventing people from ever committing a crime, meaning people would be going to jail without having committed a crime.

In my opininon, psychology is a black art. There is a lot of science behind it, but there is almost no understanding behind it, and it is acknowledged that the vast majority of the brain is not understood, and some of it is probably misunderstood. Psychiatry is even worse, psychiatrists today aren't much better than the Witch Doctors of old, they try some things out and see if they work. Electroconvulsive therapy, anyone? Sure, it works for certain disorders, but we only know that because of random trial-and-error. How is that any better than the practice of trepination of old?

There are so many people that are on the edge of snapping, but never do. And there are so many people that are on the edge and snap, but wouldn't need much work to rehabilitate them properly. The "precrime" measures completely ignore these edge cases.

Oh, I forgot about potential for abuse. We can never decide on a system based on the best-case scenario alone (eliminate crime->wootBot.engage()->profit). Consider the worst-case scenario of corruption in the system, which is almost certain to happen. You'll have arbitrary arrests of completely innocent people, without the hassle of framing them first. This is a huge tool for the corrupt. Imagine it, "if you don't agree with the party line, then you must be insane, because only an insane person wouldn't go along with the amaaaazing plan. Off with his head!" It boggles the mind! We shouldn't be giving the government more tools to oppress us, we should be getting rid of the tools.

I believe in the moral superiority of "fighting fair." If I have to fight dirty to win, then I have ultimately lost. Fighting fair means different things under different situations: in a scuffle I won't knee a guy in the nuts, if he pulls a knife on me I will. Now, I'm not 100% perfect, of course there are times when I've broken and done something dishonest, imperfection is "only human." But in hindsight, I've reallized that it was unnecessary, I could have gotten along fine doing the right thing. This comes back to the issue of global terrorism. We shouldn't have to torture prisoners to get the information we need, we shouldn't have to take off our shoes to get onto an airplane just because one inept, unstable person packed C4 in his Chucks. If these are the "only" ways to have the security we need, then it means something else is broken and we're missing the forest for the trees.

The terr'ists have won.

Quote:Original post by MDI
[devils-advocate]
Presumably nobody posting in this thread has a problem with the idea of "sex offenders registers". What's the difference? As far as I can tell, judging from the original Times article, the purposes of both seem to be identical. It also seems to me that the database is only a mechanised version of what Police departments all over the world do when trying to create a theory of a crime, anyway. Does anybody here really think that people with a history of domestic violence aren't looked at with more suspicion when a murder is committed?
[/devils-advocate]

Well, sure, but those people aren't arrested without some sort of probable cause. A risk-based system for helping police narrow the field of suspects it looks at? Useful, and many of the factors that would be used (say, distance from crime, lack of alibi, ability to commit crime, etc) are somewhat common sense.

So, in my opinion, there are useful and valid ways to use this sort of system, and this "future crime" database is not inherently evil. The worry is that civil liberties will be lost if (and many would say when) police begin to act preemptively on this data.

Also, I do have problems with sex-offender registries. But the purpose of those is not so much for law enforcement but for the public. Law enforcement personnel can just look up your record. But giving the public access to it (and only to the fact that you are a sex offender, which doesn't help you know if this person raped 2 year old children repeatedly or if was simply sex with a boy/girlfriend at age 16), you're really degrading the ability of the (ex)offender to rejoin society which does not make you less likely to reoffend.

Quote:Having said that, this seems deeply unsettling, but I cannot explain exactly why. It will be interesting to see what happens when the use of the system is challenged in the courts.

Anyone have any deep knowledge of how UK courts have handled cases like this? I know almost nothing about the court system over there.

Quote:There is a huge difference between a sex offender's likelihood to become a repeat offender and a mentally disturbed person's likelihood to become a first-time offender. For one, we have fairly precise statistics on how many first-time sex offenders become repeat offenders, we have no clue how many mentally disturbed people even exist to determine if it really is a contributing factor to crime.

It's true, and the correlation-doesn't-equal-causation argument is also good. Most of that research is looking at crime from the wrong direction (that is, at crime that has already occurred), which doesn't help us understand how to prevent or predict it accurately (or, for that matter, if we should try).

I should point out that sex offenders are not particularly likely to recidivate when compared to a great number of other 'types' of offenders.

Quote:The "precrime" measures completely ignore these edge cases.

You're right, but I would probably add that the precrime system knowingly ignores them.

Quote:The terr'ists have won.

Just delete that post, capn.