- Criminal justice policy should be informed by data, but we should never allow the sterile language of science to obscure questions of justice.
Translation: if you're poor and black, you get more jail time. Even better. So when you're poor, you also get a public defender who isn't skillful enough to recognize the racial and economic profiling of "evidence based sentencing" to even defend you against it. This is absolutely horrifying. This is not justice. This is twisting statistics to corrupt the criminal justice system into an aristocratic tool of oppression. The first step to correcting this is transparency. The second is recognizing that strict Utilitarianism is neither moral nor just. The third is educating the public enough to recognize a simple single level of indirection.markers of socioeconomic disadvantage increase a defendant’s risk score
The risk-prediction instruments are not very transparent (some are proprietary corporate products)
Strict Utilitarianism leads to some pretty dark places. For example, Utilitarian Peter Singer advocates infanticide for handicapped babies, to "maximise happiness." To invoke Godwin's law, Hitler's methods and goals – eliminating inferior genetics – were quite commendable from a strictly Utilitarian standpoint. I think Utilitarianism is a good place to start. But like most ideas, an absolutist position ends poorly. EDIT: I just realized you might have been asking "How is this policy Utilitarian?" Utilitarianism is "the greatest good for the greatest number" or some variation thereof. I think this policy is Utilitarian because it says "statistically poor and non-whites are repeat offenders, therefore they should get more jail time." Statistically, this does indeed reduce crime. At the cost of unduly punishing individuals who would not have been repeat offenders, and being unjustly lenient to rich whites. The "we shouldn't harm individuals for the sake of the group" is definitely a Deontological argument (Deontology is kind of the opposite of Utilitarianism/Teleology and can be roughly summarised as "the end doesn't justify the means"). I am definitely not a Deontologist. But in this case, it seems obvious Utilitarianism is unjust. You can't just put all poor black males in jail because they're statistically more likely to commit crimes. I'd also note the particular danger of this policy, is that the correlation of recidivism and race+wealth is a step removed from "we should use statistics for sentencing!" Hence my "indirection" comment.
Hm, wouldn't another way of conceptualizing "the greatest good for the greatest number" be to say "the longer we keep disadvantaged members of society in prison, and the more punitive the measures we take against them, the more trouble they will have finding jobs & contributing to society in positive ways"? In other words, I don't think a "sentencing by the numbers" policy is necessarily justifiable under a robust rendering of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is just a methodology; it seems unfair to utilitarianism to evaluate it in a weak, narrow-sighted form. Especially when you leverage something like rule utilitarianism, utilitarianism can be made to support things that we traditionally think of as deontic, like rights.
Yes, and let's think about this in the extreme. Let's say I'm arrested for shoplifting, but my profile says I'm a huge risk to become a murderer. Can they lock me up for 20 years? This shit sounds too close to Minority Report for my liking. Good on the normally fascist Holder for opposing this.
Both you guys missed that this Also would help continue our trend of profit-based prisons and reform systems. That's what stuck out at me. We would have people competing to make the "best" risk rating system - but what is best? Is it most accurate or least risky (ie, err on the side of caution)? What happens when the maker of the risk model got sued down the road because they didn't accurately predict someone's recidivism? (We move to more and more conservative models in an apparent "pr" or "safety" move.) what happens if the company making the best risk model also happens to invest in private prisons? Or private probation centers (I put up an article about those last week if you didn't see it)? It could be a lucrative investment.... Of course I think all these would be bad - but I can see the pieces being laid down for them to happen. Maybe we would have multiple "crime risk bureaus" like credit bureaus and every year you could check yours to see your "crime rating" and what you could do to improve it. Would convictions fall off after 7 years... No...not in America...crimes for life.The risk-prediction instruments are not very transparent (some are proprietary corporate products)