
How Will Technology Change Criminal Justice? - bootload
http://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2016/01/how-will-technology-change-criminal-justice.html
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rayiner
I'm much more interested in how science can change criminal justice. For too
long, the scientific community has been content to leave the justice system to
its own devices. Letting it carry on as a scientific backwater, like nutrition
or social science. Consequently, police have technology without any idea of
how to use it, or more importantly how to understand its limitations. For
example, forensic experts are routinely allowed to testify about random match
probabilities as if they are equivalent to the probability of guilt, even
though in practice lab error dominates the random match probability as a
source of error.

This is an area where technologists can succeed where their colleagues in the
physical sciences have failed. It is easy to pass off quackery as reliable
forensic methods. It would be a disaster if, e.g., it was as easy to pass off
quackery as legitimate data forensics. The only way that can be prevented is
if the legitimate practitioners, the institutions that represent the
mainstream of the profession, are vocal in calling out the charlatans that use
unreliable methods.

~~~
Xcelerate
I agree. In the spirit of that other article posted a few days ago ("It's
better to let n guilty people go free than to imprison one innocent person"),
I'm of the opinion that the field of criminal justice needs a _huge_ overhaul
in terms of rigor. We need professional statisticians working on cases that
involve guilt and innocence. We need to provide accurate probabilities to
jurors. We need replication and peer review of lab results.

As a society, we owe a fair and accurate trial to everyone, and if we have the
technical resources to improve upon the existing process, then I think we have
a moral obligation to do so.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> the field of criminal justice needs a huge overhaul in terms of rigor. We
> need professional statisticians working on cases that involve guilt and
> innocence. We need to provide accurate probabilities to jurors. We need
> replication and peer review of lab results.

This misjudges the fundamental operation of the justice system. Talk about
probabilities is there to sound good, not because the justice system wants to
_use_ statistical calculations.

[http://volokh.com/2014/01/02/wrongful-convictions-proof-
beyo...](http://volokh.com/2014/01/02/wrongful-convictions-proof-beyond-
reasonable-doubt/)

> So here we had a case where there were no other witnesses, no “corroborating
> physical evidence,” a “word against word situation,” yet the judge concluded
> that Montgomery was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt because the judge saw
> “no motive whatsoever” for Coast to lie (though it turns out that Coast
> indeed had such a motive).

> My sense is that in such cases convictions are fairly common (though not
> universal), especially when there’s no obvious motive for the witness to
> lie, but sometimes even when there is.

This wasn't just any word-against-word situation. This was a girl
retroactively accusing the neighbor of raping her _seven years in the past_ ,
when she was 10. No evidence was ever offered (nor could it have been,
really); no support of any kind was ever required for her to have a young man
thrown in jail for several years.

And my observation in passing earlier, that her accusation _couldn 't have
been supported by any evidence even if it had been true_, is significant:

> What’s doing the work in many of the convictions, I suspect, is that the
> very ubiquity of the risk makes factfinders realize that — if we were to
> constantly consider this generalized risk, in the absence of more specific
> information — a wide range of crimes couldn’t be effectively prosecuted.
> That’s especially true of child molestation and rape, but it’s also true of
> many sorts of felons’ possession of guns, robberies, and the like.

We've created a justice system that requires large numbers of punishments for
crimes which could never be demonstrated under ideal conditions. It shouldn't
surprise us that we then don't prosecute those crimes with statistical, or any
other kind of, rigor.

Consider a very typical word-against-word: a traffic cop writes you a ticket
for running a red light. You show up in court and say "it was yellow". The cop
says "it was red". He doesn't have to give evidence; his word is worth more
than yours. Why?

~~~
tptacek
Off the top of my head, and not that I don't have sympathy for the point
you're making, but:

* Because their individualized incentive to lie --- or, more likely, to retcon a false belief that the light was yellow when it wasn't --- is far less than yours. In fact, it probably does not matter to them one way or the other if you win your case; they won't lose a penny.

* Because they're a third-party observer tasked with monitoring your compliance with the traffic light, whereas you drive through hundreds of lights without burning a milliseconds thought on any of them.

* Because they're trained to monitor compliance with lights, and you're not.

* Because they've testified repeatedly before the court and have a track record, and you don't.

* Because given the cohort of people contesting tickets, you're statistically likely to be wrong, because so many people contest tickets for bogus reasons.

I'm not trying to argue that the police are always right about traffic tickets
(although it _is_ the case that I have less sympathy for people cited for
traffic violations than for almost any other offense [and I get cited too!],
given the risks that noncompliant driving imposes on everyone else).

~~~
thaumasiotes
As I understand things, traffic tickets are generally revenue to the police,
so they do care if you win your case. They'll only really notice if large
numbers of people start doing this, but a principle that their unsupported
word is no better than yours will certainly rise to that level.

There are a lot of process reasons to give the police the legal right to
overswear civilians. They basically boil down to the same problem discussed in
the Volokh piece, which is that without that right they lose the ability to
prosecute (I'm not claiming they are prosecutors; I want to use that word in a
more general sense) most of the cases that are meant to be their job.

But this isn't compatible with the much-vaunted notion of "innocent until
proven guilty"; it's actually a judgment that most innocent people should
discover that it's impossible to be found innocent once they're charged.

~~~
rayiner
Police don't have a "legal right to overswear civilians." They have very
diffuse incentives to lie (the fine goes to the municipality), while
individuals have a very specific incentive to lie (the fine comes out of their
pocket). Thus, considering their incentives, their testimony is generally
considered more _credible._

~~~
tptacek
More importantly, _individual_ police officers usually have _almost no_
incentive to lie, because losing traffic ticket cases costs them nothing
personally. Quotas assigned to traffic police are for _issuance_ of tickets.

It would be different if they got a bonus or something for winning cases.

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sandworm101
Horrible title. The OP has fallen into the trap of describing policing as the
entirety of "criminal justice". Cops are only one of many branches of the
criminal justice system, one that has very little authority in comparison to
courts or corrections.

I thought I would be reading about forensics or how technology might help
corrections officers rehabilitate offenders, but instead it was about what to
do with all the traffic cops if cars drive themselves ... a purely
hypothetical problem atm.

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csense
The major thing that needs to change in our criminal justice system is that
defendants' privacy should be better protected by the legal system. In olden
days, having your court record accessible to the public wasn't too much of a
problem, because in order to know about someone's criminal past, you had to
walk through the courthouse and spend all day poring over dusty file folders.
Which would only be done by people who really cared (especially since they'd
have no way of knowing which of the thousands of courthouses in the country to
look in, unless you told them where you were convicted).

Now that we have powerful computers that can store and index all those
records, and ubiquitous networks that can deliver the data anywhere, you can
get instant information about anyone's interaction with the criminal justice
system right from your desk (or your phone) with a few clicks and a few
dollars on your credit card.

If convicts, or even people who have only been arrested but never convicted,
now have a ton of trouble getting education, employment, and housing, how are
they supposed to improve themselves or re-integrate into society after their
release?

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hwstar
Instead of building more prisons, geofence non-violent convicts to specific
areas for the length of their sentence. Sci-Fi writer David Brin's
"probationers"is one way (although somewhat extreme).

